Just because you have a visually appealing, SEO-rich website doesn’t always mean that you’re seen as high-ranking worthiness in Google’s eye. Many people forget about one of the important ranking factors out there; site speed, and although it isn’t as vital as some of the other 200 plus ranking factors, this element of your webpage shouldn’t be ignored. If you’re not sure where your website’s speed is, you can utilize Google’s free tools that allow you to test your pages for both desktop and mobile use. More importantly, it’ll provide you with suggestions as to how to enhance your website’s performance. Here is everything you need to know, whether you’re starting from the bottom up or already have a developed webpage and need to optimize it’s speed.
Performance Reflects Your Stats and Ranking
Your sites overall performance is a key factor in how Google ranks your website. If your landing page isn’t working effectively and quickly, your ranking is jeopardized, but what most people don’t know is that your Ad Rank and advertising costs are also going to be affected. With a slow website, people are likely to click that “back” button that gets them away from your website, and Google’s sees this as a poor user experience, which hurts your conversion rate.
Stats That Makes Sense
What does this all mean? The following stats should will show you just how important your user’s experience is, not only in the eyes of Google but also in the eyes of your success.
- 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds or less.
- 40% of consumers will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- People expect webpages to load just as fast on their mobile devices as they do on a desktop.
- Estimates show that even a 1 second delay in site speed can result in a 7% lower conversion.
Suggestions for Site’s Speed
There are a variety of suggestions you should work through to ensure that your website’s speed is working to its fastest possibility. These factors are as basic as selecting high quality website hosting, as complex as website design and everything in between like modifying your caching system. First, take advantage of Google’s tools; Pingdom and Pagespeed Insights to see where your site’s speed is at, and then work through these suggestions to enhance it.
Check the Charts
Google offers many charts that show you vital information pertaining to the performance and success of your website. One of them combines the two and will show you the relationship between your slow website and user experience. Sometime as little as a large file can truly slow down the entire website significantly which decreases the user experience, but you’ll also be able to see how many of them wait to receive the content you provide.
Website Design
Your website design can also play a huge part is slowing things down. While designing your very own website from ground up is a proud moment, investing in a web designer that knows how to create an incredible website and simplified coding that is timely. They’ll also be able to inform you if your web pages are just too busy, and as such, will be able to simplify that as well.
File Sizes
To instantly decrease the amount of time that is spent loading your website, try to reduce the size of images. This is actually a fairly easy process and there are many tools out there to get your images smaller without jeopardizing the appearance of them, or sacrificing your website’s visual appearance as a whole.
High Quality Hosting
While you don’t have to purchase the most expensive hosting service out there, the cheapest really isn’t going to cut it today. You get what you pay for, so always choose hosting from a reputable company, and more importantly, one that is appropriate for the type of website and technology you are using.
These changes could be very simple for you to implement, or timely or costly depending on how severe your site’s speed is suffering, and although this is only a minor ranking factor within Google’s ranking regime, it shouldn’t be overlooked. Your user experience is a huge component to your success, and if everyone is clicking off of your website within seconds because it won’t load, your webpage really isn’t serving its purpose anyway, right?
