7 Key Facts on Website Speed & Why It Matters So Much

How Much Time Do You Spend Waiting For a Webpage to Load? 

The importance of website speed in search engine results has long been recognized. And it is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Slow website speed generates a negative user experience, which may cause people to abandon your site and go to your competitors. And it's even more significant than search rank because humans buy stuff, not search engines.

According to statistics, half of us do not wait more than two seconds for website content to appear! 

Here are 7 key facts on website speed

1. A 7% drop in conversions can be caused by a 1-second delay in page response.

2. The average annual increase in webpage load speed is 22%.

3. The download of the many pieces—parts of the page: graphics, style sheets, scripts, Flash, and so on—takes up 80% of the time it takes for a Web page to load.

4. 79 % of web shoppers who have had problems with a website's functioning say they will not return.

5. 73 % of mobile internet users have complained about a website that takes too long to load.

6. A website that crashed, froze, or returned an error has been reported by 51% of mobile internet users.

7. Consumers anticipate a website to load in two seconds or less, according to 47% of respondents.

Read More >> How To Choose The Simplest CMS Platform For Your Website

Why Page Speed Matters

What is the significance of website loading speed? What is the significance of a fraction of a second? What is the solution? It's a huge difference! It has an impact on the user experience, search rankings, sales, and conversions.

• Conversions are killed by slow websites.
  
• The long-term consequences of a slow website
  
• The speed of your website has an impact on your Google ranking.
  
• The first impression you make with your website is its speed.

Tools to Measure Your Web Speed

How can you check your website speed? Google provides its own speed testing tool, Google PageSpeed Insights, which assesses the performance of a page for mobile and desktop devices to help you optimize your site's speed.

Page Speed Insights evaluates the speed of your website and offers recommendations for improving it. On both mobile and desktop browsers, it examines all three Core Web Vitals.

This tool allows you to view the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for your website. Google PageSpeed Insights is a website speed test tool that rates your site on a scale of 1to 100.

Ways To Increase Your Website Speed

Google has stated that one of the indications utilized by their algorithm to rank pages is site speed. Furthermore, research suggests that when Google evaluates page performance, it may be calculating time to the first byte in particular. Furthermore, a poor page speed means that search engines can scan fewer pages with their crawl budget, which may have an impact on your indexation.

Here are some of the key ways to improve your page speed:

1. Enable Compression

Reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are more than 150 bytes using Gzip, a file compression software tool.

2. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

You may substantially boost the speed of your page by optimizing your code (including deleting spaces, commas, and other unneeded characters). Remove any code comments, formatting, or unneeded code as well. CSSNano and UglifyJS are recommended by Google.

3. Reduce Redirects or Minimize HTTP Requests

Your visitor will spend more time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete each time a page redirects to another page.

4. Reduce Server Response Time

The time it takes for your DNS query is one of the most important elements in how quickly your page loads.

A DNS, or domain name system, is a server that maintains a database of IP addresses and hostnames. A DNS server is what converts a URL into an IP address that shows its location online when a user types it into their browser.

Read More >> How To Boost Your Website Organic Traffic

WordPress Plugin to Improve The Page Speed

NitroPack IO is the most powerful, light-weight, and up-to-date website speed accelerator available, specifically developed for Google PageSpeed (Lighthouse). NitroPack examines your website's Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse results. With NitroPack, you can easily increase the speed of your website. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

Conclusion

An average user now expects web pages to load in less than 3 seconds. If you fail to match this expectation, you will lose a significant amount of website visitors and, as a result, revenue. Getting your page load times to where you want them to be is a difficult task, but it will have a huge impact on the overall performance of your site.

Looking to improve your website speed today? Contact us and we will do a free audit first and then give you a solution on how to improve.

Let’s Get Connected