This article will explain a little about website page speed and why it is important to implement it on your website.
What is Page Speed
The term page speed refers to the time it takes to download/view the content or media of the web page. The page speed measures the duration between the click of the web link and the website to be completely loaded in the browser.
What Class’s as Slow
Research from Google engineers shows that a page load time over 0.4 seconds can discourage users to search. This can be quite frightening when the average page load time is around 6 seconds.
1 in 4 visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load and 46% of them will never revisit a slow loading website.
Your website has to engage a visitor within 5 seconds before they think of leaving. 75% of mobile users will leave your site if it takes more than 5 seconds to load. So your page speed may be something you need to consider if you would like to improve bounce rate and increase conversions.
Why Improve Website Speed
Page speed is highly regarded as a ranking factor by Google. Most websites that rank at the top of page one have a page load speed under 1.5 seconds, having a slow loading website will have a negative effect on your rankings.
Web pages with a slow load time see higher bounce rates. The world is moving at a much faster pace these days and people are becoming more inpatient. I remember waiting around 30 minutes for a game to load on my commodore 64 and it was worth the wait, but these days waiting 5 seconds for a web page to load seems like a lifetime.
Improve conversion rates. Having a smooth running website allowing the visitor to seamlessly browse through your products or services is always good for improving conversions.
Keep your visitors happy. There is nothing better than a happy customer, a positive experience on a website will keep your customer coming back for more and they will also tell their friends!
We recommend to anyone with a website to have a look at their website speed performance to see if it can be improved as there are many benefits to increasing page speed that we may not have covered in this blog!
There are many things we can do to help improve website load speed on an existing website.
Please get in touch if you would like to know more about the benefits of having an optimised website.