The importance of your website’s page speed and how you can improve it

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Today’s blog is all about page speed, why it’s important and how it can be increased on your website. Page speed relates to how fast your site responds to web requests. 

Why should I focus on increasing my website’s speed?

Your website’s speed might not be at the top of your priority list, but it should be because it affects many things regarding your business. It could be the only difference between you gaining business or your competitors gaining that business instead of you. 

According to statistics, 47% of people won’t even wait 2 seconds for content to load.

Your first impression

Your website is the first impression you give. You’ll need it to load fast in order to give your customers the best user experience. A fast website shows reliability and a professional approach. It will immediately impress your customers and make them trust you, leading to them being more likely to do business with you. 

79% of users are less likely to buy from the site again if they are dissatisfied with the website’s performance.

It affects your SEO

Website speed has been a ranking factor for Google since 2010. The higher your site ranks on Google, the more credible it is. People are way more likely to look at the top results than the ones further down the SERP. It’s important to rank highly to compete against other companies that offer similar products to you. 

The top 3 results on Google get 75.1% of the clicks. 

Google has implemented a Mobile First Index, so websites that are optimised for mobiles will appear higher on the SERP. This is because using mobiles to browse the internet is becoming more and more popular, and in fact, mobiles are currently used more than desktops to view websites. 

Bounce Rate Decrease

There is a correlation between the speed of your website and its bounce rate, the faster your site is, the lower the bounce rate. People are way more likely to engage with your website if it gives them information fast. Bounce rate refers to people who view your website and leave it straight away, meaning it didn’t offer any value. Sure, people can leave a website for many reasons, but this is likely to be one of them. If you use tools such as Google Analytics, you will have access to the bounce rate of your website. 

Pages that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take 5 seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%.

What’s affecting it?

There are many factors that affect the speed of your website, such as servers, compressed images, poor coding or large page elements. These factors will need to be evaluated and rectified quickly to maintain a fast website. 

So how can I improve my website speed?

First of all, you should analyse your website’s speed by using Google PageSpeed Insights, which will give you a percentage of how fast your site is running. You can then use PageSpeed tools in order to speed up your website and start gaining more customers. 

Another tool you can use is GT Metrix, which again will analyse your website speed and offer appropriate solutions to help you speed it up. 

At Complete, we ensure that all of our websites are built to load quickly and that they’re optimised correctly. If you need any help with improving your site’s speed, please get in touch.