Why Your Website Speed Matters
Updated September 29, 2019 by Dillon Browne
Five Reasons Everyone Should Worry About Website Speed
And as 5G rolls out and more homes are hooked into fiber internet lines, don’t be surprised if visitors start getting more and more impatient. When we write an updated article down the road on website speed, we may well be talking about one second!
Not convinced that you need to worry about website speed? Let’s go over five reasons site speed is important.
1. Make Your First Impression Count
People make snap judgments. And if your website is taking a long time to load, you’re going to look bad. It’s not just an inconvenience, a slow page load time suggests that you’re not a professional and you’re not taking your website seriously.
2. A Good User Experience is Vital
User experience has emerged as arguably the most important aspect of web development. At Surge3, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to craft a better user experience.
We’ve realized a few things. First, you have to get users what they are looking for and you have to do it quickly. When people visit your site, they are looking for something. Contact information, product pricing, whatever.
Even if you design an amazing website that is intuitive as can be, if the load time is slow, people will struggle to find the information they need. This will result in a poor user experience.
3. Kiss Your Conversions Goodbye
Amazon did some tests that found that if they slowed down their website by just one second, they’d lose $1.6 billion dollars per year. Why? As we already noted, people will struggle to find information and will be more likely to abandon your website. This means they won’t be making purchases or engaging with you.
4. Your Search Engine Rank (SER) Will Decline
Guess what, Google and other search engines have already figured all of the above out. So when search engines send out bots to crawl over your website, one of the things they frequently check is how long your website will take to load.
If your site takes more than 2 or 3 seconds, Google already knows visitors are going to have a bad experience. Even if the content is great, even if your products are awesome, Google could punish you with a bad ranking.
Google will also start sending fewer and fewer bots to your site. This means new content, such as blog posts or products, might not even be noticed!
5. And the Headwinds Will Only Build
We don’t want to sound too dramatic, but a slow site could set off a cascade of negative developments. Think about it. Let’s say you have a slow site. So Google doesn’t rank you very highly. Now, you’re getting fewer hits. Even those visitors that do end up on your page simply abandon your site, which hurts your SER even more.
Over time, fewer people are noticing you. This means you’re getting less attention and fewer conversions from word-of-mouth. As your revenues decline, you might try to reduce costs, producing less content, skipping needed site upgrades, or using cheaper servers.
Of course, the end result of this should be obvious: you’ll get less traffic, user experience will decline, your rankings will drop, and the situation will only get worse.
On the other hand, if you have a fast website, you could build momentum. People spend more time on your page, so your rankings start to improve. Combined with a good user experience, your conversion rate also increases. And suddenly, you find yourself with more resources to reinvest.
So yes, everyone should worry about website speed.
