Every small business and large enterprise today has a website. While web design, user navigation, theme, and suitable content are all critical elements of a good website, one thing many people tend to oversee is the website's loading speed.
It is important to understand that today’s buyer/consumer/target users are always online. This means that suppose they want to access information online, they will do it through their laptop, desktop, tablet, or Smartphone. Also, this digital customer is quite impatient. They don’t give another chance to websites that are not optimized for mobile devices or websites that take too much time to load. If you want to make sure you do not lose half your target market and audience because your website takes forever to load, make sure you focus on your website’s speed.
It’s not simply your target visitors for whom website speed matters (although they are probably the most essential reason). Google as well uses the load speed of your website as a ranking signal. Therefore, if you want your website to show in the Google search results, it is time to step up your game and make sure your website loading speed is up to the mark. Conduct a speed check to discover where you stand and if your website takes too much time to load, create websites that are faster. Your aim is to increase or enhance the user experience because you want those visitors to keep coming back.
What is Page Speed and why does it matter?
Website speed means how much time a browser takes for loading totally functional WebPages from any website.
Websites or pages which take too much time to load in a browser can end up driving visitors away. At the same time, websites that load instantly will receive a lot of web traffic resulting in higher or better conversion rates.
Website speed is not only crucial for the visitors of your website but also for ranking highly within Google.
Living up to customer expectations
- 40% of the user will abandon a webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 47% of visitors expect a website to load within two seconds or less.
- 52% of users claim that instant web design or webpage loads are crucial for their loyalty to a website.
- 24% of individuals will back up quickly and go to another website if your website's load speed is too much slow.
- 88% of people who are not happy or dissatisfied with their website visitors will go somewhere else next time.
- A one or two-second delay will cost you 7% in sales.
Direct Impact on Google Ranking
Your website design speed directly affects your Google search engine ranking. Google has confessed that they want to make sure that the internet is super fast and highly useful, and easily accessible.
Google has been using website loading speed as one of the key ranking signals in their algorithm since 2010. The website speed exposes how fast a website design responds to the web requests placed by visitors.
Google suggests webpage load time for websites both on desktops and mobile devices is less than 3 seconds. However, it says that the real average loading time of the websites right now is around 22 seconds.
The search engine big knows that if individuals are diverted to slow-loading websites it will have an opposite impact on the user experience; therefore it gives high importance to webpage speed while characterizing their rankings.
Bounce rate:
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who don’t view more than one webpage before leaving the website. It has been observed that visitors close the window or leave the website when the webpage or web design they want to view didn’t load within a few seconds.
