Need for Speed: Why Website Speed Matters
by Melissa Whitman, Growth Marketing
Picture this—you're on a mission to conquer your sales goals, but your website loads at a snail's pace. Potential customers grow impatient and click away before they even get to see your products or services. Sounds like a nightmare, right? Well, unfortunately, this happens all the time.
According to a survey by Google, 53% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. THREE SECONDS! That's all the time you have to make a good impression and keep users engaged. And it's not just mobile devices, desktop users have high expectations too. In fact, website users expect load times of 2 seconds or less. If your site is slower than that, you risk losing customers and revenue.
Website performance can make or break your business
There's plenty of evidence to show that faster page speeds increase website interaction and, more importantly, boost sales. It's simple: the faster your site, the better your business outcomes. Here's some stats to prove it:
- An Akamai study found: A one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% decrease in conversions.
- Walmart saw a 1% increase in revenue for every 100 milliseconds improvement in page load time.
- 10 years ago Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales.
The cost of delay in page speed was incredible 10 years ago! And, it's not like customers have become more patient or less dependent on mobile surfing in the past 10 years. Only that the likes of Amazon and Walmart hold onto their performance stats more tightly as proprietary info for a competitive advantage.
Site speed affects your SEO
Along with user experience, interaction rates and revenue implications, website speed also influences your search engine rankings. Google has explicitly stated that site speed is a ranking factor, so if your website takes too long to load you could be missing out on valuable organic traffic. Sites with slower load times are dropped in search engine rankings, making them harder to find and much less likely to attract traffic.
This is especially true for mobile searches, where users expect even faster load times and Google uses a separate mobile algorithm. Google crawls and prioritizes the mobile version of your website with Googlebot Smartphone. Now, search engine results pages (SERPS) have switched to prioritize mobile-first indexing, meaning your site is primarily judged on the mobile version over the desktop version.
Mobile site speed is composed of the following elements:
- First content paint
- Largest content paint
- Time to interact
- Total blocking time
- Cumulative layout shift
- JavaScript
- Render blocking resources
- Server response time
By optimizing images, minifying code, leveraging browser caching, and compressing files you can ensure that your website loads quickly across all devices.
Website speed is too important to be an afterthought
Website speed is a critical consideration from the very beginning of your website design project. Quick load times should be a design feature, not something you need to continually patch up later on. In an age where consumers expect instant gratification, website speed is more important than ever. Slow load times can spell disaster for your business. From lost revenue to poor search engine rankings, the consequences of a sluggish site are many. The good news is that optimizing website speed is a continuous process, and there are plenty of resources available to help you stay on top of it.