Why Site Speed Matters
Your business website has a lot of roles to fill. Not only is it a vital source of information for customers or potential clients, but it also has the power to convert them from browsers into buyers, presents a one-stop shop for those who want to learn more about your business, and serves as a location for you to link every campaign and advert back to.
With so many responsibilities and expectations, making sure that your website is well presented, reliable, and loads quickly is vital - as any form of negative experience can quickly drive potential customers away.
When it comes to site speed in particular, there are two areas to think about:
- User experience
- Google Core Web Vitals (ranking and being favoured by the search engine)
Only when both of these are satisfied can your website be considered an effective conversion tool.
In this article we take a closer look at site speed, why it matters, and how to make sure that yours is benefitting your business rather than dragging you down.
The Importance Of Site Speed
1 in 4 website visitors would abandon research or an online journey if the site took more than 4 seconds to load, and up to 46% of users will not visit a website if they have had a poor experience in the past with regards to page load times.
These stats tell us that page load speed is not just a small detail for users - it can transform their overall experience and can make or break their connection to a certain brand or business.
From an official standpoint, Google Core Web Vitals - which launched in 2020 and are designed to assess the overall experience of a website from a user point of view as part of search engine ranking - considers load time one of the top three most important elements of a website. Indeed, it is the first of the three key areas that deals with page load time - in particular assessing the load speed of different blocks of content across every device and every page of the website.
All in all, when page load speed is not a primary focus of your business website, Google will not rank your website as highly, and users who do land on and experience your website will be put off with every extra second that they have to wait.
How To Identify The Issue
Sometimes you can attribute large images, video files, or big content chunks packed full of copy as being responsible for a longer load time. But if you’re not sure, the Google Page Speed Insights tool means you no longer have to guess - enabling you to pinpoint the issues which are causing your website to load slowly, isolate them, and then do what you can to fix them.
A super simple tool to use, Google Page Speed Insights invites you to copy the URL of your website or a specific webpage into the search bar and then allow the tool to assess your site in a matter of seconds - providing you with colour-coded results which clearly show whether your site is ticking all the boxes or stumbling at the hurdles laid out by Google’s Core Web Vitals.
The tool then provides you with some opportunities on fixes you could make, letting you know how those changes could positively impact the page load time and speed of your site.
As a completely free online tool, you can continue to engage the help of this site as you make changes - allowing you to keep on top of the impact that small and larger changes are having on your site.
Alternatively, you can try out one of the following fixes, with each of the below a common cause of slow site speed experienced by many businesses.
- Eliminate unnecessary redirects
- Put what’s called a ‘trailing slash’ at the end of your URL. This is the ‘/’ figure at the end of the link, which tells the server that the page you’re searching for is the destination and that you don’t need it to search through other pages to find the right landing page
- Compress images
- Limit plugins and extra page features and elements
- Choose your website host carefully, with an eye to quality as well as cost and affordability
What Will Happen When You Start Focussing On Site Speed?
Improving site speed is all about making sure that when a user lands on your website, whether it’s the homepage or a campaign landing page, and whether on a mobile device or a desktop, that the experience is always efficient and effective. 47% of users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, and Google Core Web Vitals consider anything longer than 2.5 seconds to be a poor score in the LCP (large content load time) ranking.
Here’s what could happen when you start to identify the issues and improve your site speed.
- User experience will be improved - your bounce rate will be lower, the average time spent on your website will be higher, and you will be able to learn more about the behaviour of users who spend more time on your site and engage with more pages and areas of the site.
- More users will find your site in the first place. When you improve site speed across copy blocks, images, videos, and the overall design of your site, Google will assess the quality of your website as high and will give you a better ranking across its search engine results. And when your website is given a higher ranking in search results, more users will find it and click through to explore and find out more about your business.
- You will see an increase in conversions. When users have their needs and preferences met, they are more likely to become customers willingly.
Site speed is not only important for the end-user; it is also an important part of getting your site rated highly by Google.
For more advice on improving website site speed, contact our Web Designers in Nottingham 01159 722 050 / hello@getyouonline.co.uk
