Why Your Website Speed Matters?
Why Your Website Speed Matters
Your website speed matters because it is the first impression you get to make with your customers. It is your main online presence—the front door to your digital storefront. It should be easy to navigate, quick to load, and boast an easy and intuitive user experience (UX). Website loading speed helps determine if you’ll even get a second of their time. Miss this, and you miss more than just a sale—you’ve made an impression and not a good one. Website load speed is so important because humans (and bots) will leave a page almost immediately if it doesn’t load instantly. We’re talking milliseconds for a human to determine if a site is trustworthy, reliable, and professional—and what does it all come down to? Page speed and the user’s need for high-quality information as quickly as possible.
What Affects Site Speed?
There are many factors that affect your website load speed. To name a few: how content-heavy your digital page is (page weight), the web design, excessive code (CSS, HTML, JavaScript, 3rd party scripts), server response time, images that aren’t optimized or compressed, network conditions, and hosting. In this article, we’ll focus on the technical details you can tweak to optimize page speed, thereby increasing conversion rates.
How to Speed Up your Website
Here are some best practices to speed up your marketing website and maximize site performance:
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) which can massively improve your page speeds and site performance.
- Optimize images and graphics (many image optimizers are available online.)
- Make sure your website is optimized for mobile-first.
- Watch how many requests you have running on the page (think add-ons like forms, chat bots, ex: Hojer embeds, social widgets, etc.)
- Minimize time to first byte.
- Double check your hosting plan.
- Use browser caching (reduces browser costs AND increases page speed.)
- Use Grip compression (the gold standard for lossless compression on the web.)
- Switch to http/2, as it handles multiple requests simultaneously unlike http/1.
- Don’t use redirects (it slows page speed.)
- Don’t use embeds or external scripts (i.e. Don’t bombard people with pop-ups!)
- Work with a partner who is an expert in all of these areas and more.
What is the Importance Of Website Loading Speed?
Welcome to the future, where attention spans are awfully quick, content is everywhere, and website loading speed is king. When it comes to ranking and conversions, the technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) details matter just as much as the website design and the quality of the content. Page loading time can be the determining factor between your business getting the sale versus your competitor getting it, and sometimes, it’s the difference between even being found at all in search engine results. Read on for the complete list of helpful ideas on how to maximize website page speeds.
Just how important is site speed for SEO? Website load speed is the time it takes to load your webpage on a given browser. Faster website loading speeds equal more engagement and higher conversion rates. People will leave a page if it doesn’t load quickly. Those who were lucky enough to have the internet in the early days of dial-up remember very intimately, patiently waiting for a page to load. Those days are gone.
How Can You Measure Site Speed and What Are the Most Important KPIs For Website Page Speed?
If you want to see how fast your website is now, use the Google Page Speed Insights Tool to check Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) such as:
- Load Time
- Page Size
- First Concertful Paint (FCP)
- Largest Concertful Paint (LCP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- Time to Interactive (TTI)
- Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- DNS Lookup Time
The Google Page Speed Insights tool will also give you helpful tips and opportunities like reducing unused Java script code and reducing the impact of third-party code used on your website.