Nobody likes waiting, especially online.
When performing a Google search, you want the results as soon as possible. Getting the information quickly is more important than where you get it. Unless you’re looking for a specific website, faster websites will always be preferred over slower ones by users.
Website speed affects also search ranking. For this reason, understanding this metric becomes essential to performance and online presence.
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How Website Speed Affects Users Behaviour
Just have to look at the most popular websites. Wikipedia articles, for example, load almost instantly and Google even proudly displays the load time under the search bar (spoiler alert: it’s around 0.4 seconds).
For this reason, the biggest competitor that you need to watch out for is the “back button“. If your website loads too slowly, visitors won’t give you a second chance.
Yet, website speed remains misunderstood by most website owners. Everybody knows a website should be fast, but not exactly how fast.
How Fast Should Your Website Be?
The general consensus among experts is that load times shouldn’t exceed 3 seconds. Most visitors seem to agree with this statement, as 79% of web shoppers who encounter issues with website speed, won’t return to the same website to buy again.
Admittedly, 3 seconds doesn’t seem like very long. However, statistics show that web pages that take longer lose about half of the visitors right away.
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It is easy to underestimate how long it actually takes for your website to load. Data collected by the Hosting Tribunal shows this. The average load times are 9.3 seconds for desktop websites and 22 seconds for mobile ones. Now, aren’t 22 seconds a bit too long? Even 9.3 seconds are too much in most cases.
Most website owners don’t seem to agree, however. Even if your website isn’t that slow, it could still be losing traffic due to high load times. So how do you objectively know if your website takes too long to load?
There are numerous tools available for checking your website’s speed. For instance, GTMetrix offers various options for testing website speed and also suggests ways to improve it. This tool is very useful for speed optimization as the site gives many accessible techniques for on-page fixes.
Long website load times can kill your online performance. As a website owner, you need to be aware of what steps to take and how to improve your website speed. This infographic gives you more details on what needed.
This is not all. You might have heard of bounce rates. They refer to the number of visitors who leave your site after only seeing one page. Bouncing is a good sign that your website has no content relevant to a particular search engine query. Even if that’s not strictly speaking true, the problem is that most people are impatient. So, slow websites sometimes have double, or even triple, the bounce rate of regular websites and Google penalises them for it.
Very true indeed, Abhijit! Bounce rate is one of the metrics that many often forget to consider when taking in consideration website speed!