Website Speed In a Nutshell

Google adds to the debate by continuously stressing how load speed affects rankings on its search page. According to Nick from the Hosting Tribunal--the slower you go, the slower you will rank.

So, to answer the question in a word speed is crucial.  

But before you go re-write your entire marketing campaign lets take a look at what the numbers say:

Lucky number 3

Statistics are clear- visitors will abandon a website if it passes the threshold of 3 seconds to load. It sounds like patience isn’t on visitors’ priority list.

Bad mouth crusade

What’s even more concerning is that 44% of visitors will complain about their bad experience to their friends. Potential customers can quickly turn into crusaders on a mission to slaughter your page traffic.

Loyalty = Speed= Conversion

To top of the pile of bad news according to a Monerate study returning customers are more valuable than new ones. Add that 52% of visitors say page speed is important for their loyalty and you have the formula to drive your conversion rates up- loyalty equals speed and speed equals conversion.

What’s The Good News

The numbers above might be concerning, but according to a study conducted by Unbounce 73% of marketers think that improving page speed is either somewhat urgent or very urgent.

And that’s good news because it shows that business is already taking steps towards providing better service (speedy websites).  It becomes obvious that consumers won’t grow more patient, so business needs acknowledge the facts and get faster to be able to meet market demands.

So, have you checked how fast your page loads?

A good start in measuring your website speed is using  Google Page Speed Insights To use it, type your page URL into the on-screen box, press the “analyze” button and voilà you should now have a reason to smile or cry.

Jokes aside, Google Page Speed Insights will generate a report assessing page speed and user experience along with suggestions for changes you can make to make your website even faster. Each recommendation is a clickable link taking you to more advice on solving page speed issues.

Fix, fix, fix.

There are many more tools out there that can help you assess your web page speed and all of them come with recommendation. Once you’ve identified the bottlenecks on your site, the next step is to fix them.

Most of the recommendations speed tools provide concern common fixes such as reducing the size of images, improving your hosting, optimizing your code, using a content delivery network, compressing your site, using caching, optimizing scripts and reducing the number of external services you use.

Page speed is as important as your website design, ad targeting and content. In many cases it’s even more important, as visitors won’t get the chance to evaluate your content if your website doesn’t load on time, would they?

You can’t expect visitors to suffer through the agony of blank loading page and not get frustrated and leave.

Then where does that leave you?

It’s either on the road of failed marketing campaigns and revenue loss or on the speedway of optimized web page with high conversion rates and loyal customers. The choice is yours but: “May the speed be with you!”

Infographic URL: https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-speed-affect-website/