In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter if your site takes an extra one or two seconds to load? Actually, yes. It does. That may sound silly, but studies have found that for every second your site takes to load, you lose a significant percentage of visitors. Yes, a single second can make a dramatic difference in the number of people who see your website.
Below, we’ll dive into why this is so. How the loading time for your website can greatly affect its effectiveness and how you can tell how your site is doing.
Search Engines Care
Yes, Google cares how fast your page loads. Why? Because they care about the user experience. People are irritated with slow websites. Search engines want to send their users to pages that meet their expectations and keep them using that search engine in the future. If the competition has a great looking page that loads faster, Google will rank them higher.
This means that page speed matters for SEO. If your site will rank higher if it loads faster, that means your website will get more search engine traffic if you have a faster loading website.
It Lowers Your Bounce Rate
What do people do when they click a link and it loads slowly? They bounce. Your bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your website within the first couple seconds. There are a number of ways to lower your bounce rate, and having a faster loading website is one of the most important. There are so many other websites out there, users have to be particularly invested in your web page to wait for it load properly.
Slow Sites Are Untrustworthy
When your page takes more than a second to load, users wonder why. What’s wrong with this website that it can’t even load? Users browse sites that load quickly every day. When yours doesn’t, it raises the question of trust. Should they trust that a webpage that doesn’t load properly will have the information they were looking for? Is this really a business I want to work with if they don’t even have a proper website? When other businesses have fast loading pages, that gives those other sites more trust than the user currently has built with you.
Your Site Can Look Great And Load Fast
You don’t have to give up beautiful imagery or fancy site elements to make your site load faster. A great web designer will optimize your site elements for you so your page takes less time to load. We have a free SEO tool you can use to check your page speed. Because your site can look great and load fast, there’s no reason to let site speed make your pages less effective with visitors.
