Website Site Speed
Website speed is often overlooked by SME’s as a wish-washy metric where for larger organisations who understand its impact it’s a fundamental measurement.
There are several technical reasons why site speed is of high importance, but for this post, we’ll stick to just two.
SEO improvements
When Google’s algorithm determines a website’s Pagerank it uses a number of measurements to determine how much value a website offers its users.
Google doesn’t want to be seen recommending websites to its users that take a decade to load, because this doesn’t look great for them. So to get around this issue, part of the criteria for SEO Pagerank is the site’s load times.
This means if you’re going to invest in a new website, it’s always important to check the load speed of other website’s the developer has built, this will give a good idea of how fast their websites are.
There are many factors that determine the load speed of a page, from hosting, images, video and plugins and code on the site. Looking at this in detail and figuring out how you can drop some weight to speed up loading times is a great investment.
Google offer a free website speed check tool here and it’s always good to set a load speed goal before you start tinkering!
Conversion Rate
The next reason why load speed is important is simply down to website conversion rates. The longer your customers have to wait to make an order, the more likely they will leave.
When looking at the data, it’s clear that even a 1-second increase in page load speed can increase conversion rates by over 5%.
This is especially the case at checkout, where the biggest leaks can exist and customers are likely to drop out of your funnel.
