28 Feb Why Increasing Your Website’s Speed Can Save Your Business
Details create the big picture, and that certainly holds true to how the success of your website leads to business profits. It is important to make sure everything on your website is running smoothly to cultivate a pleasant experience for people visiting your page, drive more traffic, and grow sales. A commonly underestimate factor in the success of a website is the speed at which your page loads. In reality, this can make or break the success of a website. Here is why increasing your website’s speed could save your business.
User-Experience
Any online user can attest to the frustration of waiting for a web page to load. A few seconds can make all the difference for user experience on a business’s web page. In fact, the expected load time of a page by visitors is generally two seconds or less. Additionally, almost half of your visitors will likely abandon the page if the load time is three seconds or more. Just a fraction of a second could result in a strong positive or negative impact. If increasing website speed makes it vastly more likely that people will stay on your page longer, then it also increases the likelihood of them buying your products or services.
Google’s Experiment
Google once conducted an experiment, asking people if they would rather see 30 page results or 10 page results for a Google search. The majority preferred 30 page results, and Google tried it on some of the SERPs. They found that pages with 30 results had traffic drop by 20% in comparison to the pages with 10 results. The difference? Half of a second load time. In a blink of time, astounding plummets in traffic occurred on Google’s pages. Imagine the difference in your traffic if you increase your page speed by one or two seconds.
Effects on Ranking
Of course, page speed is not on the same level of page relevance, but it should not be disregarded in your efforts either. While page speed is just one of more than 200 signals Google uses to determine page result rank, it should still be treated as an important component of building your business’s website. Optimizing page load time greatly helps conversion rates, as well as helps users find what they’re looking for sooner and even facilitate more purchases.