Top Reasons Why Page Loading Speed is Important
There are two ways to look at a website’s page speed. The first is how long it takes to fully display the content on a specific page, commonly known as the page load time. Page speed could also mean the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server. This is referred to as the ‘time to first byte’. Overall, both metrics are important, and we’ll look at some of the reasons why.
Boosts search rankings
Google uses several factors known as ranking signals to determine how to rank web pages. Site speed remains one of the top-ranking signals. Remember that search engines have a limited crawl budget. This means that when the web pages are taking too long to load, they can only crawl fewer pages on that site. This affects how the site is indexed and eventually its rankings.
Improve user experience and conversion rate
Other than that, site speed is also a factor that greatly affects user experience. Typically, a good page load time is three to four seconds. However, this varies depending on the type of website and industry. Pages that take too long to load have higher bounce rates. A bounce is simply a session where the user is not viewing more than one page on the website before leaving. If a site takes too long to load (typically more than 4 seconds) most people will not stick around. The bounce rate is also an important ranking factor. Slowly loading web pages also result in lower average time spent on page and lower conversion rates.
Improve the performance of PPC campaigns and social ads
Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook also favor sites with higher loading speeds when running ads. These platforms want to show their users the best results for whatever they are interested in. Facebook even announced that site speed will affect CPC as ads that don’t offer the best user experience will not be prioritized. When running Google Ads, you’re likely to have a higher quality score (you’ll pay less and rank higher) if your web pages load in 3-4 seconds.
Tips to improve site speed
- Utilize file compression on your website to reduce the size of CSS, HTML, and Js files on your website.
- Take steps to optimize your code such as deleting unused code & comments, reducing spaces/commas, and unnecessary characters to boost page speed.
- Avoid using page redirects unless it’s necessary
- Leverage browser cache on your website. This allows users to store certain information on their browsers so that it doesn’t have to reload the entire page during every visit.
- Optimize server response time by choosing a reliable hosting solution, addressing performance bottlenecks such as slow database queries and other factors like inadequate memory.
- Consider using a CDN which is simply a group of servers located in different data centers to ensure users from different regions can access your site faster and more reliably.
- Optimize images by choosing the right format and compressing them for the web.
If your current website is slow or you just want to get more information about how to make your website faster, contact us today!