Why site speed matters

Much like dog years and country miles, waiting more than a few seconds for a website to properly load feels a lot longer than it actually is. Even still, the people demand speed, and you gotta give the people what they want?

Ok, put it this way, when you get to a website that takes forever to load, how does that make you feel? If you’re like most people then you probably experience an emotion that feels a lot like anger and frustration.

And when you’re on a website that makes you feel angry or frustrated, do you usually stay on that website? Probably not.

Instead, you’d go to another website, right?

Just like the people who are looking for your products and services on your website right now. The longer you make them wait, the more interest they lose in you.

Here’s the hard facts:

• 47% of people expect your site to load in less than 2 seconds.
• 40% will abandon it entirely if it takes longer than 3 seconds.

You get a little bit more room to move with mobile visitors, but not much.

• 85% of internet users expect a mobile site to load as fast or faster than on their desktop.

But why else is site speed important?

User Experience

People visiting your website are looking for something – you should give it to them as quickly as possible.

Conversion Killer

Using the stat of 40% site abandonment rate: 10,000 site visits a month = 4,000 lost potential customers.

Google rankings

“We’re striving to make the whole web fast” – Google does take into account website load speed when ranking websites.

Enough of the problem, let’s talk solutions. A few things you can do to optimise the speed of the website:

Google’s PageSpeed

These tools allow you to analyse your PageSpeed score and will also give you suggestions on how to make your website faster.

WordPress hosting

If you’re on the WordPress platform considered looking at hosting providers who are specifically optimised for WordPress

Compressing images

Low effort, high impact! Reducing the size of the images on your website can significantly improve page load speeds.

Externally host video content

Embed videos on your site from third party platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. This saves space and results in faster load times.

OR:

Give DeType a shout. We offer free website audits that cover everything from the overall user experience of the site, the quality of the build and content, speed recommendations and suggestions on ways to increase conversions. Whether your website has just launched or is a few years old, our Web Audit Report will provide a clear, actionable, and prioritised list of recommendations to help improve your website.

All stats courtesy of Kissmetrics: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/loading-time.pdf