“Page speed plays a very important role in online business. It can increase or decrease the revenue of your online business, depending on how much time your site takes to load. There is a shocking relation between site speed and conversation rate, which is particularly true for e-commerce sites.” – Search Engine Journal
There are more than a few reasons to increase page speed, the two most obvious reasons are search rankings and user experience.
Improve Search Rankings with Faster Page Speed
Google Webmaster Central posted a blog post on April 09, 2014 stating, ”Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.” Since Google’s bread-n-butter is delivering a user experience, you can best believe Google puts emphasis on page speed when determining ranking factors. It should also be noted, mobile sites are penalized for loading slowly.
Improve User Experience (UX) with Faster Page Speed
KISSMetrics reported that 47 percent of users expect a page to load within two seconds. So, if your site takes more than two seconds to load, there is a good chance users won’t be sticking around long. Remember, people are ACTIVELY searching the web. When people are actively shopping or actively researching , they don’t want something as simple as page speed becoming yet another obstacle.
Ways to Check Page Speed
Webpagetest.org allows users to run free page speed testing and compiles results into waterfall charts that break down content, check for possible optimizations, and make suggestions for general improvements after receiving a page speed score out of 100.
Page Speed Insights generates page speed scores out of 100 while providing analysis of both the desktop and mobile versions of your site.
Unlike the tools listed above, Load Impact simulates a scenario where your page is flooded with users. This simulation will determine the areas where your site cracks, as well as how to fix any problems before they happen.
In Conclusion
Remember page speed is just one of about 200+ factors Google takes into consideration when organizing results pages. Use your time and resources wisely!
If you have general questions about Google rankings, or you would like a website evaluation, contact The Clix Group. If you want 5 ways to increase your page speed, click here!