Why You Should Care About Your Page Speed

According to a study by Akamai, 40% of web visitors end up abandoning a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 73% of mobile internet users have experienced such a problem. Page speed is an essential factor for any website user experience, but most times much more attention is given to improving the website’s aesthetic design or overall functionality.

Unfortunately, page speed matters most to web visitors, with 47% of users expecting a page to load in 2 seconds or less. Any longer than that brings frustrations to web visitors, and they click away from your site to see if any of your competitors offer a better browsing experience.

Here’s why you should care about your page loading speed:

Users Care About Speed 

It’s pretty apparent that if your site takes too long to load, your customers get disappointed and will likely leave. All your efforts could potentially mean nothing if visitors don’t sticks long enough. Just a small delay, even a second in page speed could drop conversions by 7%, according to an extensive analysis by Kissmetrics.

A higher bounce rate, a decrease in conversions and less time spent on a page are all signs of a slow website. To increase your customer pool, you might want to customize your website by using options like coordinating your caches. For more prominent websites, you can consider a server configuration monitoring tool to optimize speed for users and enhance security.

Mobile is More Significant Than Ever 

Over the last three years, we’ve seen a 56% increase in overall mobile traffic, meaning there’s a likelihood that more users use their tablets or phones to browse. Recently, Google introduced a new signal in their search ranking algorithms – site speed. This modification favored mobile-friendly sites and sites that had previously dominated fell off the grid.

This was Google’s way of acknowledging that consumers are increasingly going mobile. Being able to provide your customers with a good web experience could determine whether you make sales or not. So, ensuring that your page speed is up to date will ensure you stay ahead of competitors.

You Can’t Track What You Can’t See 

How can you solve a problem that you don’t even know exists? Pretty challenging right? Web-based plugins can offer lots of functionalities to websites. However, not all are streamlined, and you may want to remove any plugins that are poorly designed and outdated. This is because they can slow down your website and provide less timely alerts when visitors bounce.

Ensure that you keep a close eye on how many web plugins are live on your website and ensure that their value matches the impact on your web page performance. You may also want to upgrade your web hosting services to improve the speed at which pages load.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Competition Is Increasing 

Search engines are increasingly improving their algorithms to stay ahead of the competition and keep up with the changes in the online landscape. Google announced that page speed on mobile phones would be a contributing factor to SEO rankings. Trends have indicated that speed matters most when going after competitive advantage.

Therefore, the more competitive your SEO is, the higher the likelihood of considering load time. SEO is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to drive more traffic to your website. 70-80% of users ignore the paid Ads and choose to focus on organic search results, according to a Search Engine Journal article. By not optimizing search, you are abandoning your visitors.

Conclusion 

It is easy to lose sight of the importance of website speed, especially with all changes taking place in the digital world. Staying on top of the performance of your website ensures you not only stay ahead of the competition but also keep your visitors happy.