Your business website could have the best content in the industry. But if you have a slow-loading website, conversion rates and organic traffic may suffer. This is why it is important for a business to optimize its website not only at the front end but at the back end as well. It is the only way to provide users with an optimal user experience. Let us try to figure out why page speed matters and what can be done to improve it right away.
Site speed is important and correlates to your organic traffic, website bounce rate, and conversion rate. Understanding which metric is affected by slow page speed is of critical importance.
The website page speed is measured via numerous core vitals that Google explores in the indexing and crawling process of the site. Web pages that take a long time to load will result in a poor grade for page experience in the search console. This leads to fewer organic conversions and clicks.
The worse your site speed, the higher your bounce rate. The bounce rate of a website is determined by the number of visitors who land on your webpage and leave without navigating to any other page on the website.
People do not like web pages taking a long time to load. For every second that it takes to load, a lot of potential customers are lost. When a website has a high overall bounce rate, Google considers it to be unrelated to the searcher’s inquiry. Google is of the opinion that as the page loading time increases from 1 to 5 seconds, the probability of a user bouncing from a page increases by a whopping 90%. So, the focus has to be on how to increase page speed.
Website conversion rates are the percentage of people who complete a desired action out of the total number of website users. This may include signing up for an email, filling out a form, or purchasing a service or a product. Which metric is affected by slow page speed and tends to fluctuate with every passing second?
Even if the visitors wait an additional few seconds for the page to load, it will impact their overall experience of purchasing the product. According to research, the first five seconds that a page takes to load have the biggest influence on conversion rates.
To obtain insights into specific page load times, there are a lot of helpful tools. Using them can help you determine which metric is affected by slow page speed. You just need to zero in your URL and wait for a few seconds for the result to emerge. The page speed test will showcase opportunities for improvement along with the diagnostics for the specific page.
Google has a few handy tools. One of the tools that we use extensively is the Page Speed Insights test. While the current version of the tool does not provide an overall number of page load times, it also provides an overall grade for page performance out of 100.
To get an idea of why page speed matters, look at the average score of your competitors. This will give you a framework for your expectations of the site’s speed in the given industry. Do not forget to observe the desktop and mobile scores of your website, as the scores will be different from each other. Google tends to grade mobile performance much tougher than desktop performance.
Based on results from Google Page Speed Insights or third-party tests, you will get a better idea of which metric is affected by slow page speed. There are a couple of issues that help address the issue of a slow-loading website.
Images are better for the user experience if they load quickly. You may think loading the largest and highest resolution image would suffice, but it can do more damage to your site if done incorrectly. The lowest resolution and maximum picture size that the browsers support are also fixed. If your image is larger than that, the page load time will be slowed without any further benefit.
Though all the pages will be compressed, you need to consider the images on each page. If there are too many images, it could lead to a slow-loading website. An extremely useful tactic that we would like to use is the notion of lazy loading when it is viewable in a browser.
Leveraging caching is useful when you tell a browser how long it takes to locally store an image’s page. In this manner, browsers demand fewer data while navigating through your pages, which eventually speeds up the load time.
Be aware that you have less than 3 seconds of your time before 40% of your visitors will leave your website. Learn how caching of webpages can boost your website’s performance.
You need to spend it optimising, according to your SEO experts. This is going to have an impact on conversion rates and bounce rates.
Caching is the process of storing your information on a user’s device so that it can load faster. This is especially important when boasting page loading speed for returning users. It is possible to store a static version, as this will be the initial load for a browser and will load faster.
If you are using a content management system like WordPress, your website may lag as there are too many back-end installations slowing it down. Consider the possibility that you might be overloading the same website if you keep adding plugins to incorporate new features while it is already in use.
SEO has always been about generating revenue. This is nothing new, as search algorithms change dramatically every year. It is going to change with buyer behavior and technology. These companies would guide you on how to increase page speed with minimum effort. Website page speed, along with organic traffic, is expected to rise, and more revenue will be generated.
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