Why Website Speed is Important
There are a handful of important elements that combine to create an effective website; design, usability, and branding all being key factors. However, the speed at which the website loads is often overlooked, and it shouldn’t be! If you’re looking for ways to make your website more efficient, ask your web development team what they can do in terms of making it load faster.
You will quickly see (pun intended) how much having a more efficient website speed can impact and benefit your business.
Your Audience Expects Fast Results
The internet has conditioned human beings to expect a response to our actions right away – a concept known as instant gratification.
If a user visits your website and it does not load quickly, they are going to assume there is some sort of problem, either with the website itself or their own browser. Regardless of the reasoning, this user is almost always going to leave your site and not return. That means, if your website takes too long to load up, a potential customer or client is likely to leave your page, and perhaps even seek out a website belonging to a competitor of yours instead. In this example, your slow website will have directly caused the loss of a sale.
Loading Lag Kills Conversions
Having a slow website will affect your ability to convert visitors into online sales. On a slow website, a user will not visit as many pages, meaning they could miss entire product categories, or not even make it to the portion of your website where sales are made. If the user cannot find what they are looking for because your website pages are taking a long time to load, they will likely grow frustrated and leave without making a purchase. Additionally, their negative experience on your website may make them reconsider visiting again in the future.
Slow websites have higher bounce rates. The bounce rate refers to users who visit the website and “bounce” back off of it without viewing any additional pages. When the main page takes a long time to load, the user is less likely to visit a secondary page, contributing to a higher bounce rate for the website.
High Speed = Better SEO
Due to the overall importance that website speed holds in terms of user experience, Google has started taking website load time into consideration when ranking websites. The most recent “Speed Update” took place in July 2018 and is part of Google’s initiative to promote websites that load quickly. According to Google, the trend of highlighting websites that load quickly has been established to “encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.”
To summarize this point, having a slow website will negatively affect your chances of ranking well in search engines, specifically Google.
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If a user has an unpleasant experience on your website, they are significantly less likely to return at a later time, and much more likely to choose a competing site for their next visit; meaning, you will lose a customer, likely for good if your website loads slowly.
Are you unsure of how fast your website is? Want to make some improvements to your website’s speed? Call the Geeks today to find out how we can help take your website to the next level – fast!
