Everyone nowadays has a website, whether it’s a small local shop or a large global corporation. Platforms such as WordPress and Joomla have made it simple for anyone to create a website. However, while creating a website is simple, maintaining one is not. One of the issues that website owners overlook is loading speed and how to make web pages load faster.
You scoured the internet for hours looking for the product you want to buy. But when you finally get to the e-commerce store that sells it, the business’s website takes forever to load… Isn’t it annoying? Consider what your visitors are going through when your website is slow. They will eventually become impatient, leave your site, and seek a faster alternative. People despise waiting, whether it’s in a long line for groceries or stuck in traffic on their way to work.
We can’t afford to be late from anywhere because the pace of our lives has increased exponentially in recent years. And, given how valuable our time is these days, being impatient makes perfect sense. We don’t like waiting hours for a website to load for the same reason… People, just like cars, will refuse to use a slow site.
Slow site speed makes it difficult to open a web page at times. A slow website not only turns away visitors but also hurts your overall business.
In this article, we’ll look at how website speed can affect your business in a variety of ways.
The 4 reasons why having a fast website is important
1. Ranking on Search Engines
A lot of work goes into developing and designing a website. But if no one sees it, all of your hard work goes down the drain.
To put it simply, if you want an audience, you must rank high on search engines. One approach? You guessed it — having a fast-loading website. And, while we already know that site speed is expected by your users, it is also expected by Google.
Google understands that when your website loads quickly, users will typically stay on your website for longer, convert more, and bounce less. It’s no surprise that Google rewards a fast-loading website by increasing its visibility (ahem, ranking it higher) in search results.
More specifically, site speed has a significant impact on your SEO rankings, both on desktop and mobile (especially now, with Google’s mobile-first initiative), as well as paid advertisements on Google, which directly affect your quality score.
2. Enhances Customer Engagement
If you want to build your brand, effective customer engagement is critical. Customers will become more attached to your brand if they believe it is credible, safe, and trustworthy. When they visit your website, they expect it to load quickly so that they can get what they need and move on. However, if your site does not load quickly, users may be disappointed, tarnishing your brand’s image. It will be difficult to retain dissatisfied customers, and you will most likely lose them to your competitors.
In the early days of the internet, users were willing to wait up to five minutes for a simple webpage to load. I recall browsing Yahoo on a dial-up connection and downloading my favorite song from the internet in 15 to 30 minutes.
Fortunately, those days are over, as the internet is becoming increasingly faster. Users nowadays expect websites to load in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Speed has become a new norm in the world of the World Wide Web, and slow websites will eventually struggle to remain profitable.
3. Minimizes Bounce Rates
What exactly is a ‘bounce,’ you may wonder? This term refers to someone who only views one page on your website before leaving. In other words, a “bounce rate” is the percentage of people who visit your website and then immediately leave. Slower websites typically have higher bounce rates, whereas faster websites typically have lower ones. Bounce rate is also a ranking factor for SEO, but we’ll get to that later.
Users who leave your website because of slow loading times are simply not converting. (To refresh your memory, conversion occurs when a user completes a desired action, such as signing up for your newsletter, sharing on social media, filling out a form you’ve provided, and/or making a purchase.) If your website has a lengthy checkout or conversion process, a recent study found that a two-second delay can increase checkout abandonment by 87%.
In other words, the longer it takes for your website to load, the more time users have to change their minds about you and what they are about to buy. An internal Amazon test discovered that every 100-microsecond increase in load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that time is money.
The answer? A quick and easy-to-use website that draws users in during their purchasing decision, causing them to convert and return for more.
4. The First Impression Is Everything
When a user visits your website, they expect it to load quickly. They will assess your credibility based on their experience with your website. If it loads faster, your audience or customers will recognize you as a trustworthy and responsible brand. When a user finds quality information on your website, it makes them happy and content, and they are more likely to do business with you. Users may not feel safe or trust your brand if your website is slow. This hurts the user, who may avoid logging into the website in the future. In this case, you will not only miss out on opportunities to rank your website on search engines, but you may also lose valuable customers to your competitors down the street.
What factors influence website speed?
1. Network
If you designed a lightweight website, there may still be loading issues because the network is slow. Local networking equipment and the quality of ISP services have a significant impact on network connectivity.
Some techniques, such as minification, compression, and hosting content with a CDN, are useful for delivering web resources quickly, even if the connection speed is slow.
2. Page Weight
Large JavaScript files, high-quality images and video content, heavy CSS files, and so on all add significant ‘weight’ to a webpage, affecting loading time. A page that requires more resources will take longer to load.
3. Hosting Location
If the hosting locations are far apart, the content must travel before arriving at its destination. For example, if some website files are hosted in a data center in Michigan and the image files are hosted in a data center in California, and a user logs in, he will have to wait until all of the files are sourced to their device.
As a result, the location of the website’s hosting determines its loading speed.
In conclusion, Website speed contributes to a visitor’s first impression of that website and business. Developers and testers work hard to make a website both aesthetically pleasing and functional by incorporating a wide range of features, content, and functionalities. However, if these features or content are not properly optimized, it may have a negative impact on website speed.
The speed with which a website load is important to anyone who visits the site. 47% of people, according to research, do not wait more than two seconds for a web page to load.
Speed is an essential component of the user experience, especially for e-commerce websites, as every second of delay can cost them millions of dollars. This article explains three reasons why website speed is important and why optimizing website speed is critical.
Related Article: The Ultimate Guide to the Best Business Management Software in 2023
Bonus Point
Building a website with high performance is not a problem for Chigisoft. We built one of Africa’s fastest proptech websites for a real estate company.
