Why is page speed important?

Website speed is important. It’s not just about convenience, it makes real-world difference to the effectiveness of a website. Search engines now consider the speed of a website in their search results ranking, so a slow site could really get demoted in the Google search result rankings.

Why is page loading speed important? We call browsing the internet surfing because it’s like skimming a wave of information at high speed. The amount of stuff on the web offers us vast choice, but it also makes people impatient, and this has real-world impact on how people interact with your site, or more relevantly: how they don’t.

Some stats

The experts say that as the load time of a web page increases from 1 second to 7 seconds, the probability of a mobile visitor bouncing (leaving again right away) increases 113%. [Source: Think With Google].

The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load. [Source: Google Developers]

The average time a mobile web page takes to load on a 4G connection is 14 seconds. The average on a 3G connection is 19 seconds. [Source: Google DoubleClick blog]

In 2016 75% of global mobile users were on 2G or 3G. [Source: GSMA Mobile]

There’s a lot that goes into delivering a web page to a visitor (site hosting, site design, size of assets used, compression, their own connection…), so the rabbit hole goes deep, but here’s the best place to start:

Here’s the tip

Fear not! Here’s a powerful little tip to getting your page load time right down.

1. First, click this button:

2. Then on that page enter the address of your website and click analyze:

3. Then scroll down and it’ll give you a bunch of tips for speeding up your site. Ta-daa!

Some of it will be simple, some crazy technical, but it’s a great place to start. Don’t worry about getting a 100% score, remember the real aim is to create a good experience for your (potential) users.

Not to brag but Google gives my site 100/100 😉 .

Bonus:

If you sell things online you’ll find Google’s lesser known mobile speed revenue estimator tool helpful too (scroll down). It allows you to estimate how many more website sales (according to average conversion stats) you’d be able to gain with a site speed increase.

Still have questions?

Like to see how I could help with your site? Let’s have a no-obligation and non-tech speak chat. I’ll see what I can do.