Why Site Speed Matters

The speed of your site matters for a number of reasons, but it can basically be broken down into 4 different categories: bounce rates, conversion rates, customer experience, and SEO.

SEO (Search Rank)

Lets start with SEO, after all it is what brings customers to your site to begin with! Google, the most widely used search engine, announced in 2018 that site speed would not only affect desktop search but mobile search as well. Since then some have wondered how much of a difference it would make.

Analysts have found there is a clear correlation between website speed and a higher search engine rank. It seems that the faster your site is, the more likely that it will have a high rank in Google. And of course the higher it ranks, the more traffic you’ll get to your site! But will they stay on your site?

Page speed is especially important for mobile users because they’re typically on a slower connection than desktop users. As such, Google’s speed testing tool gives a stiffer speed rating for slow mobile sites.

Bounce Rates

Keep customers on your site. Statistics show if your site doesn’t load within 2 seconds, almost 10% of customers will immediately leave your web page. That percentage is called the bounce rate, and if it takes longer to load then the bounce rate will go up. If it takes 7 seconds to load then close to a third of your visitors will leave before they’ve even got a chance to see your page! Google says as page load speed goes from 1 second to 5 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 90%.

Conversion Rates

Customers are more likely to buy if your site is fast. After all, to a customer this may be indicative of your companies customer service over all. Research shows that the faster your site loads, the more likely customers are to buy. Conversion rates can drop by 4.42% for each additional second your site takes to load.

Amazon, the largest e-commerce site in the world, calculated that if their site were to be just 1 second slower, they’d loose 1.6 billion dollars. Ever wonder how much your site is loosing by not being faster?

Customer Experience

Our customers or readers are the main reason we’re all here, right? Nobody likes to wait, and nobody likes to have their time wasted. The faster your site is, the more impressed your customers will be, and the better experience they’ll have on your site, and the better mood they’ll be in to buy your product or give you a good rating!

Forbes reports that 70% of consumers say page speed impacts their willingness to buy, and that 1 second is the “magic number” for page load speeds. Does your site take longer to load that 1 second? If so, you might want to have a look at our Fastest Web Hosting Rankings, and see about getting a faster host.