Website Page Speed — In this age of digital transformation, time is of the essence for all. What considers the best experience for most of the people is being able to do what needs to be done in the quickest time possible. And that holds true for most things, especially on the internet.
Websites these days are not just about design and functionality; it is also about the page loading speed. No matter how well designed and informative your website is, if it takes almost a minute to load a single page, then you are lagging behind your competitor’s websites who loads faster than yours.
There are more to your website loading time than what you’ve probably thought before. Below are the two crucial points that compel website owners like you to optimize your website’s loading time.
It matters to Users.
A website that loads fast leaves a good impression to the users. Aside from that, online users have a growing rate of declining attention span. According to an article of Timothy Egan posted on New York Times online, a survey of media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span of humans had fallen to eight (8) seconds from twelve (12) in the year 2000.
It is a crucial point showing that as technology improves, the attention span declines. Optimizing your website to meet this emerging user behavior will surely improve its performance.
And it matters to Google too.
Google puts user experience at the core of its technology and business. And what matters to the users, also matters to Google. It is the behavior and preferences of the online users that became the basis of all improvements applied to the search engine.
According to Google, the average loading time of a mobile landing page to fully load all elements is at 22 seconds. However, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. And that where the problem lies. While most websites take 22 seconds to load, the users’ attention span is only at 8 seconds – at the most.
Below are the critical points Google shared to webmasters.
In the same way, a slow page loading time might affect your website’s search engine ranking. Since Google prioritize user experience, it will not let a slow loading website rank on the first page of Google SERP despite having marvelous content.
What do you need to do?
To improve your website’s loading time, below are the steps that you need to take to optimize it.
- Using the webpagetest.org, check the loading time of every element in your website.
- Improve what needs to improve such as:
- Compress large image and video files
- Remove unnecessary plugins that slow your website loading time
- ALWAYS, depend on a reliable and high-quality web hosting server to make sure that your website loads on an optimal level. Servers are also responsible for loading time of the website, if your server is too old and lacks resources, your website won’t load fast enough.
- And you are covering visitors and audiences across the globe, you need to also use Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up the delivery of your website’s page loading on areas far from the location of your web hosting server.
Page speed is indeed a crucial part in the success of a website. In this age when human attention span is shorter than the goldfish, the only way website owners need to do to adapt is to optimize their websites from content to loading time according to the behavior of the users.
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Sources:
- wisdekcorp.com
- nytimes.com
- thinkwithgoogle.com
