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Is Your Page Load Time Affecting Your Bottom Line And SEO Results?

page-load-speed-

When it comes to waiting for web pages to load we’re all getting increasingly impatient. Back in the day of dial-up, you could wait around for hours for a page to load up. In this day and age of superfast internet connections a few seconds feels like a lifetime. Have you looked at your website page load speeds recently? If you haven’t it could be affecting your SEO search results and more importantly your bottom line.

Most of us aren’t using our own websites day in and day out and the chances are we wouldn’t really notice if our website is running slow. It is also unlikely that the page load speed is one of our website KPIs. However there is a strong case that it should be.

Web content management systems are great, but they tend to add an overhead to page load times. Add to that large images, javascript functionality and complex design styles. These all make your site look great, but take time to load and render in the browser. If your website pages are taking time to load it could be negatively affecting your bottom line and search engine rankings.

We’ve included an infographic produced by Kissmetrics at the bottom of this post. Some of the stats really jumped out. Have a read of these:

40% of online shoppers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

56% of people surveyed expected web pages to load either faster or only a bit slower on their mobile than on their desktop.

If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Page load speed often gets overlooked as part of the development process, because most web designers are running on fast internet connections and don’t really notice when a site is loading slowly. Clients fall in love with large images, smooth transitions and impressive functionality, but don’t realise the file sizes that can be involved with these.

The thing to remember is that plenty of your website visitors will be using much slower connections and older computers than you are. On top of this more and more of your website visits will be from mobile phones on slower mobile connections. This means page load speed should be high up on the list of priorities for your website.

Back in April 2010 Google announced that it was taking website page load speed into account as part of its ranking signals.

Read this article on the Google webmaster central blog for more information on their official announcement.

There is also a pretty detailed analysis of how page load speed affects rankings on Moz.

So not only is a slow page load speed affecting customers directly on the website, it could be preventing them even getting there in the first place.

If you are considering redesigning your website, or are keen for it to be running as well as possible we recommend putting page load speed as one of your website KPIs. As a minimum all pages should load in under 3 seconds and ideally in under 1 second.

There are a number of free tools that help you to measure the page load speed of your website. Two of our favourites are:

The main things that you can do to speed up your site include:

  • Optimising the file size of your images
  • Reducing unused code in the website templates
  • Ensuring your hosting is up to the job
  • Using caching tools to save pages of your site, so that they are loaded quickly
  • If you have a lot of images on your site and users in a number of countries, a CDN service will be worth investigating

The more complicated and heavily used your site the more it will benefit from speed optimisation. That said every site out there will benefit from load speed optimisation.

Get your website developer onto it if you haven’t already.

Optimising all the pages in a site takes time. If you are redesigning a site you need to make sure that this has been provisioned for as part of the project.

If you are optimising an existing site, then expect that you will need to discuss charges with your web developers.

Here’s the infographic from Kissmetrics – if you need any further convincing.

loading-time-infographic-lrg

 

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