Today, where businesses are opting for digital platforms for maximizing their sales, they are trying to get the best look for their website in order to delight the visitors and give them the best user experience. With the advancements in technology, the internet is getting faster day by day and so are the internet users. Visitors expect the google page they are visiting to load at a quick speed. They are not even ready to wait for a second or two for the page to load.
A slow-loading page is never liked by users and they will instantly move to your competitor's web page if they become unhappy with your google page speed. I don’t think you will ever want to risk your site as well as your business by ignoring the importance of page load speed. Right?
Here are a few facts that will help you understand the importance of page speed and how it helps in attaining the changing website performance standards.
- In 2016, the average page load time was nearly 5 seconds.
- If your web page takes more than 3 seconds to load, you are more likely to lose your visitors as nearly 40% of the users may abandon your site and move to your competitor’s page.
- Half of the internet users have an expectation that a website should load within or less than 2 seconds.
- Approximately 70% of the visitors who find your google page speed slow, will never return to your page again.
- Many of the users will share the poor experience they have got because of the slow page speed with others.
What Does Google Page Speed Mean?
Website speed or page speed means the time a browser takes to load a fully functional web page from any website.
The users or visitors may drive away from a website if it takes much time to load. On the contrary, the web pages or websites that load in quick time tend to get more organic traffic and they always have a chance of obtaining better conversion rates.
The Significance Of Page Speed And Website Performance
1. The First Impression Matters A Lot
In order to know how your business brand or company is going to be perceived by the audience, the first impression of your website plays a crucial role. Potential clients and visitors of your site come to a conclusion about your business depending upon their experiences with your website.
Having a quick loading page will always give a positive first impression. This is because a fast loading website never fails to impress the users and the biggest factor is it gives a sense of professionalism. It is a simple fact that users believe that a website is more professional and dependable if it loads in quick time. As we humans are known to relate speed with efficiency, it is implied in the case of websites also.
On the other hand, if your website is slow to load, it will be looked upon as unsafe and untrustworthy by the users. It becomes immensely difficult to change the perception of users once a negative image is built for your website. Most of the online shoppers have agreed that they will never visit a site if they have experienced the slow loading speed of that particular site.
2. Impact On Your Google Ranks
Do you know that your page speed also affects its Google search engine ranking? Since 2010, Google has been using page speed or website speed as one of the important ranking signals in their algorithm. The loading time of your page reveals how fast it is responding to the users’ web requests. Google always wants to ensure that the internet is super fast and easily accessible. For this, it has also recommended page load time for sites.
The time recommended is 3 seconds for both desktops as well as mobile sites. However, according to Google, the average loading time of a website at present is way more than that of the recommended time. Google also knows that slow loading sites will have an adverse impact on businesses as users will get a bad experience. That is why it gives importance to page loading speed.
3. Influence The Conversion Rates
The conversion rate of a business can be affected by the speed of its website and there are a number of studies to prove this. Visitors always prefer to be on a site that loads quickly rather than wasting their time on any slow loading web page. Many businesses and companies have experienced a drastic change in the amount of traffic coming to their site as well as their conversion rates when the page loading got improved even by a few milliseconds. It has resulted in more business for them.
4. Affect The Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is nothing but the percentage of visitors visiting your site and leaving without doing anything or without even viewing more than one page of your site. As visitors look for a site that loads fast, they immediately leave the web page or close the window when that particular page is unable to load within a few seconds. It has been observed by BBC that if their pages take even an extra second to load, they experience a loss of 10% of their users.
What Are The Factors That Affect Your Google Page Speed?
- Weight Of Your Page
High-quality images, video content, large JavaScript files as well as bulky CSS files add plenty of weight to a web page. This results in a considerable increase in loading time thus reducing the page speed. The more resources a web page has, the more time it requires to load.
- Network Issue
Even though you have a lightweight site, you might still have issues while loading your site. The reason for this may be a slow network. The networking equipment used as well as the internet service provider’s quality affect the network connectivity. However, there are a few techniques such as compression, content hosting with a CDN, minification, etc. are useful for making your pages load fast even if your connection is slow.
- Hosting Locations
Your Google page speed is also determined by the hosting locations. Your content has to travel a lot of distance if the hosting locations are situated far away.
To Wrap Up:
If your Google page speed is slow, it can force the visitors and potential customers to leave your site and again go to the search engine results and this will end up in your visitors visiting your competitor's site.
To avoid this, you need to make sure that you have a web page that loads fast and you don’t lose any of your potential customers anymore. It is important to keep the interest of your visitors alive so that they keep browsing your site. Having a fast loading website will also give better results as far as your search engine ranks are concerned. All these things help us know how important your Google page speed is.
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