Page speed is very important when considering your ranking on SEO. Imagine a consumer opening your website and it does not load in the first 3 to 5 seconds. This would mean that you are losing potential clients, and hundreds or maybe thousands of them because when someone clicks a link and it takes long to open or load, they automatically give up or lose interest on that site. They will definitely click on the next link which they think will load faster than yours.
Page speed is also important to experience of the user. Pages that take longer to load will tend to have more bounces on it as not many people will be clicking on that website because of its tendency to load slowly.
This bad user experience will cause you a loss of revenue and also get penalized by the search engines and in the long run have an impact on your rankings. Let us see what the factors that can lower your page speed are:
Uncompressed images
Too heavy images take time to load and therefore lower your page speed. Use JPEG for photo and PNG for images like logos.
Unoptimized browser plugins and app
Before settling on one browser, I suggest you test your website on all of them then decide which the best to use is.
Media files
These videos might be informative for your website but really affect your load time thus create trouble to host on your server.
Pick a host
Pick a host that fits to your business size because in the long run cheap is expensive.
Too many ads
Ads are not just bothersome to your users but also a drawback to page speed.
Double barreled code
If your HTML or CSS is too dense it will lower the page speed.
Your theme
Should not be highly designed since such have a lot of effects that will definitely slow down your page speed.
By avoiding the aforementioned drawbacks, you are on the right track to increasing your page speed and in turn getting higher ranking.
So back to the main question of why you need to increase your website speed. Here are some of the reasons why:
Todays consumers are impatient
As a consumer or buyer you dont want to get to a website that takes forever to load. Its not only annoying but also boring. Consumers will most probably not waste any of their time waiting on a website to load for close to more than 5 seconds, thats just impossible unless its a very very patient person of which it will be one in a million. These consumers want everything immediately; they lose interest in you when you make them wait longer.
Website load speed affects your SEO rankings Online Search
Page speed continues to serve as one of the many factors that determine your ranking on search results. It reflects how fast a site responds to web requests.by speeding up your website it will not only be beneficial to you but also to the internet users because they be most satisfied with the experience theyre getting.
If you want your site to load fast you should firstly save your CSS and scripts as external files. This will mean that all your files only need to load once the site works perfectly and would therefore translate to pages loading quickly.
Secondly, use caches. Ensure you enable your cache settings so that when your pages are running slowly, your website can depend on cached versions instead.
Lastly, use GZIP tools for compression. You can save a lot of KBs without losing quality. You dont have to sacrifice your beautiful high definition pictures, just use the GZIP compression tools to make them smaller. This will also help increase page speed.
Conclusion
A slow loading website can cause you to lose potential interested buyers in your business. They can easily lose interest and click back to search results and hit on your competition. Always make sure your website loads quickly in order to help potential customers to interact with your companys website so as to help you grow your ranking on the search engines. You should then try to reduce your page loading speed to less than 2 seconds and watch those interest shooting up!
