Every business today wants to delight its website visitors by offering a great user experience. With the growing technology, the users are fast becoming impatient; most of them are not ready to wait even two seconds for the website to load.
A slow website speed deters users and they will switch to your competition if they are unhappy with your page speed. With this fast-evolving buyers behaviour, one cannot risk overlooking the importance of website speed.
Below mentioned are a few facts related to why website speed is important which will help you understand why the page speed plays an important role in meeting the website performance standards:
- The average website page loading time was 5 seconds in 2016.
- Around 40% of internet users are most likely to abandon a website it will take more than 3 seconds to load.
- Almost 50% of the users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or lesser.
- 70% of the users who find your website speed slow will most probably never return to your website again.
- Almost 45% of the users will share their poor experience with the page speed and website loading with others
What is Page Speed and why does it matter?
Page speed or Website speed means how much time a browser takes for loading fully functional WebPages from any website.
Websites or pages which take time to load in a browser can end up driving the users away. At the same time, websites which load quickly will receive more web traffic resulting in better conversion rates.
Importance of Website Performance and Speed
- The first impression is the last impression
Your website’s first impression is very important for determining how your company and brand will be perceived by the users. Customers or website visitors make an instant judgment about the business on the basis of their experience with the website.
If your website has a good page speed you’ve immediately built a strong first impression. A fast loading website impresses the user and makes him happy and satisfied. Its simple psychology that users believe that fast websites are more professional and dependable. Humans have been known to relate speed with efficiency.
At the same time, a slow website is looked upon as unsafe and untrustworthy. Once the users build this negative impression, then it becomes difficult to change their thoughts.  Almost 80% of online shoppers have agreed that they won’t visit a website if they experienced slow website loading speed.
- Direct Impact on Google Ranking
Your website speed directly affects your Google search engine ranking. Google has self-confessed that they want to ensure that the internet is super fast, easily accessible, and highly useful.
Google has been using website speed as one of the key ranking signals in their algorithm since 2010. The website speed reveals how fast a website responds to the web requests placed by the users.
The Google recommended page load time for websites both on desktops and mobile devices is less than 3 seconds. However, it says that the actual average loading time of the websites currently is around 22 seconds.
The search engine giant knows that if people are diverted to slow loading websites it will have an adverse impact on the user experience, therefore it gives high importance to page speed while determining their rankings.
- Conversion rate:
A number of studies have proved that the website speed has a direct effect on the conversion rate of a business. Users prefer staying on high-speed websites as compared to slow loading websites, resulting in higher conversions. Many companies have experienced that even a reduction of a few milliseconds in the page loading results in more conversions:
Mobify decreased their loading time by 100 milliseconds and ended up having a 1.11% increase in their session-based conversions. Similarly, Walmart revealed that by improving their page time by only one second they saw an increased conversion of 2%.
- Bounce rate:
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who don’t view more than one page before leaving the website. It has been observed that users close the window or leave the website when the page they wished to view did not load within a few seconds.
BBC revealed that for every extra second taken by their pages to load, they ended up losing 10% of their total users.
What are the factors which affect website speed?
- Page Weight:
Large JavaScript files, high-quality images and video content, heavy CSS files etc all end up adding significant ‘weight’ to a webpage, whereby affecting the loading time. A webpage which requires more resources will take more time in loading.
- Network:
If you have designed a lightweight website but there may still be loading issues, as the network may be slow. The local networking equipment and the ISP services quality have a huge impact on network connectivity.
There are some techniques like minification, compression, hosting content with a CDN are useful for delivering web resources quickly, even if the connection speed is slow.
- Hosting location:
If the hosting locations are situated far, then the content has to travel before it reaches the required destination. For example, if some files of the website are hosted in a data centre in Michigan and the image files are hosted in a data centre in California, and if a user logins then he will have to wait for some while till all the files are sourced to their device.
So the location where the website is hosted also determines the loading speed of the website.
Final Words
A website which has a slow loading speed can force visitors to can leave the website and go back to the search results and then end up visiting your competitor’s website.
You need to ensure that you have good website hosting as well as good website speed so that the potential customers do not lose interest and continue browsing your website. You will also be able to improve your search engine ranking with good page speed. Hope you all have understood Why website speed is important.
Velocity Consultancy is an integrated Web Design and Web Development Company which delivers high-quality web-based business solutions. Our team of professional web designers and developers work towards assisting our clients in generating more leads and whereby increasing their sales, by positioning their business at the top place, even in the most competitive market.