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Why Page Speed Matters: Website loading times and page speed optimisation
Here at Saigon Digital, we make sure the websites we build are loading as fast as possible whilst still providing a fantastic user experience to its end users.
Website performance and page speed optimisation should be on your top priority list for your website goals. So where are we going here? Let’s see…
Humans are a funny thing. Eh? They’re impatient and tend to have small attention spans. Browsing the world wide web is no different…
When building and designing websites, so many are made that may look cool and fancy, have all the bells and whistles attached, but most of the time, the end user doesn’t want to see any of it.
Unfortunately, most website visitors just want to read the content from the page, and that’s it.
They don’t care about a parallax slider going in the background or rotating carousel trying to upsell you some new random affiliated products from your Facebook pixel history.
Page load time is becoming an ever-increasing factor when it comes to search engine ranking.
Let’s dive into some hard cold facts!
A slow website kill conversions
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
“When real users have a slow experience on mobile, they’re much less likely to find what they are looking for or purchase from you in the future. For many sites, this equates to a huge missed opportunity, especially when more than half of the visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes over”
Source: *http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/47-of-consumers-expect-a-web-page-to-load-in-2-seconds-or-less#axzz3x8iy9kp8*
A study from Amazon
Amazon Found Every 100ms of Website Latency Cost them 1% in sales.
Amazon did a study that found that every 100ms (yes, milliseconds) cost them 1% in sales revenue which equates to $1.6 billion in sales per year.
This is just one extreme for one of the busiest websites on the world wide web, but what I’m trying to reiterate here is how important website load times are nowadays.
Many people overlook website load times and are quick to install the latest plugin or script that will do something fancy on the website but might not be so meaningful in the long run. How many websites have you seen that are often loaded with a ton of ads and popups, modals etc.? This makes for a terrible user experience and can often force users to abandon the page.
Page speed directly affects your websites search engine ranking
“Speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search and Ads”
“Speed is now used as a ranking factor for mobile searches”
Source: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed
Google has revealed in more and more articles and sources across the web that page speed is a direct ranking factor for websites; in fact if your website isn’t on par with the top 10 organic pages in the SERP (Search engine results page) listings, you won’t rank on the first page.
Stay ahead of your competition.
Act now, some quick wins we can recommend:
- Make sure you have some kind of content delivery network (CDN) enabled. Cloudflare is an excellent tool for this, and their free plan is a great start for most new websites.
- Reduce image file size and image size. Consider using WEB-P format and serving responsive images by using srcset.
- Leverage browser caching. If your website uses WordPress, consider using a PHP caching plugin, such as “WP Fastest Cache”, if your website is running on a .Net server running a CMS such as Umbraco, you can use the .net Runtime caching feature.
- Minify and concatenate your assets
If you’re unsure about any of the above information and need some help, don’t hesitate to reach out to Saigon Digital for a chat. We’re more than happy to help!
Key takeaways
If you’re a developer or even an owner of a website, now is a good time to consider your performance using a tool such as Google Page Speed speed.
Think about how performance affects the user experience of your pages and evaluate if everything you have on your website is truly needed. Is any of it slowing your website down? At the end of the day, the user browsing your website is your ultimate audience.
In the next blog post of this page speed optimisation series, I will deep dive further into how to improve your website performance on a more technical level.
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