Does the Speed of a Website Matter?

Let’s assume that a potential customer is looking for an electronic product for which your brand is famous. Luckily, the SEO of your website is so effective that it appears in one of the first five links on the search result pages of Google. That is pretty impressive.

Now, the customer simply clicks your website link to see the product on offer and waits for the site to load. One second, two seconds, three seconds; the time is passing but the page has yet not loaded fully. The customer is trying to be patient but the patience is fading quickly with each increasing second.

After all, how long will the customer wait and stare at the half-loaded page? Would you wait? Obviously, no one would wait for more than a few seconds, as they have other websites to check, which are of your competitors.

Most visitors to your website are like other online users who really are impatient to wait beyond a few seconds. If the site does not load fast, they leave and perhaps with the intention of never to return. Now, this does not mean that they are bad. It is just a natural tendency of humans.

Kissmetrics have found that around 47% of consumers want a website to load within two seconds and that around 40% will leave if the loading time is over three seconds. Well, it is a fact that no one likes slowly loading pages. Thus, fast loading speed is the need of an hour.

So, the speed of a website matters significantly. Apart from preventing the visitors from being impatient and quitting the website, here are some more reasons why website speed matters:

Short Attention Spans

Undoubtedly, the attention span of humans is less than what it was a few decades ago. When online, the decline in attention span is due to the huge amount of content present on just a single webpage of a website. As per the statistics, an online user has a span of around eight seconds.

Now, if your page takes just five seconds to load, how much the visitor would see or go through in the next three seconds? So, it is necessary to ensure that the loading time is as less as possible to make your first impression as the best one. This will make visitors stay on your site after which they are likely to come back for more.

A short attention span also indicates to have only a small and relevant amount of content on the webpage. Overloaded content is one of the reasons why the page is loading slowly.

Diverse Visitors from across the Globe

Obviously, your website is not only for your local customers. It is for all consumers located across the globe so that your brand can have a huge customer base at a macro level. Now, this means your consumers will be diverse.

For example, some will have a quick broadband facility, while others will have a slow connection. Regardless of the connection speed, customer requests pass through different hops or points such as antennas and satellite uplinks. Similarly, some prefer to browse in the afternoon, while some do so at night when free.

In short, regardless of the factors that differentiate consumers, you need to ensure that your webpage loads quickly. One of the easiest and cost-efficient ways to do so is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for accelerating access from remote consumer locations.

For selecting and implementing such right ways of speeding up, you can consider hiring a reputable, affordable, and friendly online service such as wpspeedrevolution. As a tip, just check the loading speed of the chosen service’s website.

Better SEO Ranking for Faster Websites

In 2010, Google considered loading speed as a formal indicator of performance for ranking websites. However, it is vital to note that while speed is a ranking indicator, page relevance will hold more priority in deciding the rank.

Still, it is clear that a slow loading website certainly brings down the SEO rank. It is also likely to result in less organic traffic. The rank indicator is also applicable to mobile-friendly or responsive websites. Thus, slow webpages will finally lose not only traffic but also visibility on the search result pages.

To keep yourself motivated, here is a real example. After optimizing its website speed, Smartfurniture witnessed a hike of almost 20% in its organic traffic along with an increase in the SEO rank by two positions.

Better and More Conversions

Your marketing brought so many new visitors to your website but a slow loading speed takes no time in losing them all. This is because the new visitors will truly not take much time in abandoning your website if it is slow.

This abandoning itself means no new conversions. In fact, the slow speed can even result in losing your existing loyal customers. After all, no one will wait just for a webpage to load. This actually reverses your own marketing goal.

Whether on online retailer or a publisher, conversion is critical for expanding your business website. Statistics reveal that even a single second of delay can result in more than 5% reduction in conversion rates. Thus, you should optimize your website or blog such that it loads faster. You should do this prior to implementing any marketing strategy.

Better User Experience (UX) and Mobile Experience

Both these experiences are critical for flourishing online. Slowly loading webpages forces not only desktop users but also smartphone users to quit immediately and go to some other website to get the desired information, products, and/or services.

Today, mobile users are searching more on Google than the desktop ones. Further, over 65% of online time is spent using mobile gadgets. This means that more and more customers or users will be using their mobile devices to access your website. Thus, it is essential to ensure fast loading speed of your website even on mobile devices.

Conclusion

Certainly, there are a couple of primary reasons why website speed matters once your business goes online. This is regardless of the type of website published as well as industry to which your business belongs.