Perhaps you have invested in high quality and flashy graphics and content, and upon first glance, your website looks “perfect”. But, there is a special issue that many webmasters miss that could dramatically affect your traffic and particularly your bounce rates—your website’s loading time.
According to various studies on online user experience, the average web page opens in 7 seconds or less. Users expect to wait less than that for a page to load. That means that any page that takes more than that, could potentially make users leave that page.
On average 14% of people online choose to shop from other competitive websites if the loading time is too slow or if there are issues with pictures and graphics appearing on time (or altogether). And 23% will simply press X to navigate away from the page. And if they have a faster loading speed than the previous site, 64% of the visitors will visit that website again and refrain from visiting the first with the slower speed. Imagine how much important this is for keeping your visitors to stay on your web-page.
Additionally, all major search engines like Google value a website’s loading speed in their algorithms for sorting out search results. Your website has to have a fast loading speed that works in all platforms (including mobile optimization), or you’ll risk losing your rank and valuable traffic. Google has specifically created a tool to help webmasters evaluate their website’s performance: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Google will perform an analysis of your website’s speed and mobile optimization and provide you with suggestions on what to fix e.g. remove a plugin or modify a script.
Many experts like Matt Huds, ex head of spam team on Google emphasize that even small adjustments could be enough for maximizing your website’s speed. Even if it’s just removing a small plug-in or a java script coding. You don’t necessarily need a total website revamp to make it work—unless tools measuring your website’s speed bring out lot’s of issues that you need to fix.
By improving your website’s loading speed, you not only make your visitors most likely to stay longer, you will increase your conversion rates. Many studies have shown that websites that load fast, have on average 12% more conversions than the slower websites. This number may seem no big, but it actually means that you can maximize your profitability by 12% if your webpage loads fast.
Need any help with your mobile’s speed and mobile optimization? Contact us!
