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Web Development Teams can increase your website’s speed. According to a study done by KissMetrics, 47% of internet users expect a website to load within two seconds.
This goes to show that speed is a very important aspect when it comes to the success of your website in 2020. It has been a necessity, rather than a luxury for a long time now.
If you’re looking to add more elements to your site, make sure not to sacrifice the speed, or you might find yourself losing more than you have gained.
It can’t be denied that faster load times on websites are beneficial.
In this post, we will talk about why website speed matters, and when you should think about investing in it.
No one likes to wait. When it comes to waiting for websites to load, we all know that even a few extra seconds can seem like an eternity. This is especially true if you’re used to the snappy and responsive experience most high-quality sites offer nowadays.
Think about it — you wouldn’t like to spend too much time on a website if you had to wait several seconds every time you needed to switch between pages on it. Your customers are no different and if it takes too long for your site to load, they are more likely to turn to your competitors.
Top-notch user experience is a key component when it comes to brand loyalty. Even your existing customers may get tired of waiting on your site to do simple tasks. This could result in irreparable damage to your sales and customer satisfaction.
An excellent case study by Soasta has shown how much of a difference just one second can make. The study concluded that mobile pages that load one second faster can have up to a 27% higher conversion rate.
Even if you’re not very interested in the overall user experience, you can’t afford to ignore search engine optimization in this day and age. If you want your site to rank highly on Google and other search engine platforms, increasing the speed of your website should become a primary goal.
Google’s ranking algorithm used to be relatively simple back in the day, but it has come a long way since then, and now considers a multitude of factors when ranking websites. One of these factors is speed.
Specialists from Digital Silk, a web development company in Chicago are saying that increasing website speed is one of the main strategies web development teams should focus on to improve their SEO.
Faster loading time is not only a factor in Google’s ranking in its own right, but it contributes heavily to several other ranking factors. Average time on site, bounce rate, and CTR have also been influential ranking factors for a few years now.
If your website takes a long time to load, customers are likely to leave it right away, as demonstrated by the aforementioned KissMetrics study. This impacts both average times on site and bounce rate, two of Google’s most important ranking factors.
There’s also a high likelihood of previous visitors to your site remembering its name and associating it with slow response times. This will result in reservations when it comes to visiting your site in the future, leading to a decrease in CTR.
If you’re still not convinced, take a look at this Backlinko research, which found a clear connection between a website’s search engine ranking and its loading speed.
At this point, it is safe to say that evidence pointing to a correlation between your website’s SEO success and its speed is overwhelming.
Knowing the importance of website speed, you would be surprised at how little attention is generally paid to it by small businesses.
A survey shows that only about 1 in 5 small businesses (21%) plan on working to improve the performance of their website.
While that piece of news may be discouraging for the web development industry, it can be good news if you’re a small business owner. This constitutes a prime opportunity for getting ahead of the competition.
Where do you start? First, you should probably determine how fast your site is at the moment. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that can give you quite a detailed analysis in a matter of minutes. The tool presents results for both desktop and mobile users.
Google is not the only company providing this type of service. If you’re looking for a second opinion there are other tools you could use, such as the one made by Pingdom.
These page-speed reports can seem quite technical to the untrained eye, so you might not be able to do much with the results on your own.
Those looking to improve speeds without seeking outside help can focus on hosting their sites on fast servers and lowering image sizes. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do beyond that unless you hire a savvy web designer or web developer.
As consumers become increasingly impatient and develop higher expectations when it comes to website speed, a few seconds here and there can make a world of difference to your bottom line.
Digital marketing agencies are firm on the fact that developing a commitment to speed within your digital culture is imperative today. Therefore the answer to the question posed in the title of this article seems to be “as soon as possible”.
Robin Khokhar is an SEO specialist who mostly writes on SEO. Thus sharing tips and tricks related to SEO, WordPress, blogging, and digital marketing, and related topics.
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