Today’s world is fast-paced. Everything must be done efficiently in the least amount of time possible. These days, people just can’t afford to wait for too long.
So how fast should your website load?
Google engineers have agreed that a 0.4-second page load time is long enough to bore website visitors. 25% of guests will leave your site if it takes more than 0.4 seconds to run. The first 5 seconds of the visitors’ experience on your site is the most crucial time that might determine their stay. 74% of visitors will leave your mobile site if it exceeds the 5-second time frame. Every second of delay costs online merchants millions of dollars. So, once you improve your site speed, you will see a significant increase in your site traffic.
This certainly also applies to web users’ overall Internet browsing experience. Say you have a website that’s packed with content: videos, photos, and links. However, you notice that your visitors don’t stay long enough to browse and purchase. You’ve worked so hard to create this website. Why is this happening?
One of the factors that influence your site’s traffic is good website load time. Your visitors do not have the luxury of time to wait for your page to load. Even a short delay in your page load time may affect customer satisfaction, and ultimately, your conversion rate.
How does good website load time affect your site?
Your site loading time matters to your visibility. It is highly recommended to improve site speed, especially now that Google considers speed as a parameter when ranking sites. Google now ranks search results according to the mobile versions of websites. If you want to improve your website ranking, it is important to create a site that provides a fast and easy experience for users.
How is page speed connected to search engine optimisation?
Google has announced that page speed will play an important role in its mobile-first index. Basically, this means that the faster your site is, the better your rank results will be. Aside from this, a slower page speed will make search engines crawl fewer pages using their crawl budget. This will affect your indexation negatively.
How do you test your site’s speed?
To improve your website, it is a must to know its overall speed. There are some website speed test tools that will assess your site. You can also load test your website to find out what is hindering its performance. You can try some like:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://gtmetrix.com/
How can I improve site speed?
There are a couple of ways for you to significantly improve site speed. Here are some tips you can follow to get good website load time:
- Minimise your HTTP requests. Yahoo says 80% of a website’s load time is used on downloading various parts of the page. An HTTP request is needed for these page elements. The more page elements you have on your page, the longer it takes for the page to load. You must know how many requests are being made by your site, so you can adjust them.
- Combine your files. You can combine and minify your files to reduce their size. By doing this, you remove unnecessary formatting, code, and whitespace. The fewer and smaller the files, the faster your site will load.
- Defer JavaScript loading on your page. This means stopping JavaScript from loading to make way for the other elements of the page to load. Your page will load faster because all the essential elements are given time to start up.
Your page load time will improve if you work on it. With this change, you will notice that your site is being recognized by search engines more. Make sure to know your page better, and your page visitors will thank you.
