There was a time when not having a company website was enough to discredit your business. Now, not having a fast, well-designed website can be just as damaging as not having one at all. When it comes to website load time, every second counts.
In this article, we’ll examine the many reasons why website speed matters—and ways in which you can increase your website speed.
There are many reasons why website speed is so important to business owners and marketing managers. Slow websites can cause people to leave your site, or cause people to form a negative opinion of your brand.
A fast-loading website can help your business achieve:
one-tenth of a second decrease in mobile site load time can result in major increases in conversion
is the conversion increase recorded by Walmart after improving in page load time for every one second
Surely, you’ve experienced slow-loading websites yourself. Unless you absolutely must go to a specific sluggish site, you’ll likely navigate to a different website instead. It boils down to human behaviour: we’re all too busy and/or too impatient to wait. We’ve been trained by websites like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Wikipedia to expect answers to our requests immediately.
So, the question becomes: how long will people typically wait for a website to load before they abandon the page?
In short, yes, desktop speed is different than the speed in which a website loads on mobile devices. Websites typically load more quickly on desktops than on mobile—but ideally that divergence is minimal.
A responsive website ensures that your website is optimized for smaller screen sizes as well as desktops. But far too often, mobile phone load times are much longer than desktop load times.
Mobile page speed is a direct ranking factor in Google as well. This is because when users search from a mobile device, they’re usually looking to complete a task quickly, such as answering a question or suddenly remembering they need to order more toilet paper on Amazon (oops!), rather than researching a new product or compiling resources for an essay.
Some people confuse site speed with Google’s page speed score, but it’s not quite the same.
Achieving a higher Google page speed score shouldn’t guide every principle of your performance improvements. Websites with high page speed scores can rank poorly, and websites that have low page speed scores can rank highly. Projected page speed improvement is a much better guide to prioritize improvements.
One of Google’s most recent Core Web Vital updates nods to the importance of fast load times. It has added three new page experiences to its SERP ranking algorithm:
Sheer speed is a better indicator of user experience—and that 100% affects your site’s search engine ranking. It’s more important how fast your website loads vs. Google’s page speed score.
By now, you’re probably curious about how fast or slow your website is—and how it compares to your competitors.
Here are some resources where you can test your website load speed:
First, the good news: speeding up your website is usually completely achievable. But it can also be incredibly nuanced and ever evolving.
Some “high-value” things to consider include:
Every second counts—both the time it takes to load your website and the time it takes to fix load times on your website. Don’t wait. Contact the digital marketing experts at tbk to get your website up to speed.