The Importance of Website Speed

Site speed is extremely important for building a reputable brand and maximizing the online experience for the company as well as consumers. 

One of the first impacts a slow website can have is it affects the user experience. I'm sure everyone has come across a site that takes forever to load. This can become frustrating and leave a bad impression of the company in the viewer's mind. Poor user experience may cause the audience to associate the slow loading website with “bad” customer service and just leaves a bad impression about the brand. 

Conversion rates can also take a hit from having a slow loading website. According to Amazon, they lose extreme amounts of sales for every second the website does not load. This is also true for your business’s website. It only takes about 2 seconds for a viewer to click off of your website if they do not see it load. They will then go to the next search result or to a competitor's website looking for quicker or almost immediate response times and possibly purchase products or services from them. With these potential customers leaving the website your conversion rate drops and you begin missing out on opportunities to gain new loyal customers. If the goal of your website is to generate leads that convert to sales it is necessary to optimize the site for quicker load times. 

Another area you will see affected if the website does not load quickly enough is an increase in the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that a site's landing page either is not relevant to the visitors or they were not willing to wait the entire time for all the content to load. To avoid a high bounce rate only include the necessary content on the site to allow the quickest load time. 

Seo will also be affected by a slow loading website. Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google's algorithms so if the site takes longer to load it is penalized and compromised in the search results ranking. A majority of online consumers are searching on Google for business and information so a lower ranking in Google means less traffic to the site. If the site is slow the site will experience fewer people visiting the website and a high percentage of the ones who do come across the site will be leaving. 

There are a few things you can do to help speed up the load time and provide a more positive experience for the user. Start with a good host. Some free hosting companies have slower servers and there is not much one can do to speed up their servers. Do some research and check reviews for a host that will best fit your needs. 

Check your site speed and see where it can be improved. There are many speed tests that can help identify where exactly the site can be improved. For instance, https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ 

Optimize images for better speed by compressing large images. https://imagecompressor.com/ Most cameras and phones take huge images, sometimes 1 or 2 MBs in size. This will definitely cause the site speed to be impacted trying to load multiple large images. Compressing these images into smaller dimensions will help it load quicker on the site. 

When adding content, videos, or audio, use a platform with larger delivery speeds and are made for this. For instance, if you want to add videos, add them to Youtube or Vimeo and link the video from there to the site. This will certainly help speed up the load time and it will be stored and played from their servers. Try some of these options to help deliver quicker site speed and create a better overall experience for the consumer.