Why Is a Fast Website So Important?

A website’s loading time is crucial in determining how much traffic it will generate. Just like you wouldn’t like to shop at a store where the salespeople take too long to cater to your needs, users don’t like to engage with sites that take too long to load.

Here are five reasons why your site must be quick to load.

1.   Making a Good First Impression

Your website should ideally load within 2-3 seconds (even faster if it is a mobile-compatible site).

This is because a person’s usual attention span is around 5 seconds, and if your site doesn’t provide value to the user within this timeframe, they may leave and never visit again. Since your website is the first point of contact between users and your business, they may not engage with your brand a second time.

On the other hand, a quick-to-load website gives a positive first impression and lets users know that you respect their time. Additionally, your visitors can explore more in a short time because the pages load fast.

2.   Low Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of users that visit your website and leave almost instantly without engaging with any content or browsing other pages. Slow loading speed is one of the most significant contributing factors leading to a high bounce rate. These rates also impact your SERP rankings. So it’s essential to ensure that your website’s loading speed on any device is carefully optimized.

3.   Better Conversions

As per Shopify’s stats, improving your site speed by 1 second can potentially increase mobile conversions by 27%. Additionally, fast-loading sites often persuade users to check out the different product and service pages, tempting them to buy one or sign up for email updates.

4.   Improvement in Google Search Rankings

If you wish to be ahead of the competition, ensure that your website runs quickly and smoothly.

Google rankings are usually based on several factors like bounce rate, consumer engagement, and the number of times google bots crawl your website.

So, if being in the top three results is your goal, your website needs to load and process user actions quickly.

5.   Increased Number of Page Views

A quick-loading website and web pages mean that the user will be more inclined to explore and visit other pages. This is especially true for eCommerce sites where consumers browse through different products before making the final purchase decision. Ecommerce sites also offer quick checkout times.

Quick Tips to Increase Your Website Speed

1. Optimize your code and reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to less than 150 bytes.
2. Leverage browser caching to improve server response time.
3. Optimize your images for the appropriate size. You can also use CSS Sprites for frequently used images on your site.
4. Use a content distribution network so that consumers can quickly and reliably access your site.

 

Quick to load websites and webpages are vital to ensuring a good user experience. These sites also have better Google rankings. So, contact our experts at Social Jack Media if you are looking for ways to improve your website’s performance.