The importance of a fast-loading website
Websites are omnipresent.
In fact today, on average, you’ll visit at least five.
Maybe you’re on the hunt for answers. Or a new outfit.
Whatever it is, websites provide an invaluable service for well, everything.
But have you ever considered website load speeds?
I’m sure you would have. In your own searches.
You randomly or deliberately come across a site, and it takes a little long to load.
It’s clunky.
It’s…..a….bit….slow.
And, you’re out.
Well you’d be the least bit surprised to know that you’re not alone.
And that’s the problem. We want everything immediately.
Because we have ten other tabs or twenty other distractions vying for our attention.
It’s just the world we live in now.
And Google knows it too. Because their bots, like us humans, want a website that loads in the often impulsive time it takes to find ourselves on a random site.
The need for speed
Patience is a virtue seldom afforded to those online. Any friction. Any frustration. And we will leave that cart quicker than you can say “why is this taking so ducking long!” Which would probably be followed by “How annoying is autocorrect!”.
According to Google, 53% of mobile users abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Essentially, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, more than half of your potential customers may leave without even viewing your content. So the faster you are, the longer those customers of yours will hang around.
A better user experience
Fast loading websites also just improve the overall user experience. A study by Akamai found that 79% of people who experience poor website performance are less likely to return to the website. A slow website can also negatively impact the brand experience a customer has, because their interaction with the brand is a bit rubbish; if it can’t get this right… well, what does that say about everything else?
Search engine ranking
How well you perform – so to speak – gets very noticed by Google. And any search engine. Because they notice those high bounce rates of slow-loading sites. So naturally, they punish you. And put you down the pecking order. Even before they see bounce rates they punish you, because search engines include page load speed within their algorithms when rendering search results, making it a primary ranking factor. So if you want to be at the top, you need to show up, quick.
How to measure your websites’ performance
1. Visit PageSpeed Insights by Google
2. Enter your URL and hit Analyse
3. Check your Core Web Vitals assessment and Performance scores
Improving website speed
One of the biggest contributors to a slow-loading website is media such as video and images. Optimising these will significantly improve page speed.
Other areas to look at are minimising the use of external scripts and utilising a content delivery network (CDN) which can help by distributing content to multiple servers worldwide, reducing the distance and time required for data to travel.
Or, you can just come and talk to us at Windsorborn.
We can of course, help optimise.