You have probably questioned whether website speed is important in the past? OK, maybe you haven’t but you should know how fast your website is – especially compared to your main competitors.
Once you know your own scores ask yourself if it is faster or slower than other competing sites and if yours is slower take action to improve your speed results!
In this post I will give you links to test your site and provide benchmark scores to aim for.
1) Pingdom – https://tools.pingdom.com/
With this tool you should be looking at your load time with a view to achieving a score of under 2 seconds.
2) Web Page Test – https://www.webpagetest.org
Look to achieve a score of under 3 seconds with this test.
So why is page speed important?
Search Engine Ranking: In 2010, Google announced that page speed would impact your website ranking!
Google will compare site speed with sites competing to rank for the same keywords and will give priority to better performing sites than slower ones. This isn’t the ONLY ranking factor but it is a very important one to consider as it not only has an influence on search engine rankings but also on user experiences (UX).
User Experience: Also known as UX a better experience results in better performance of your website.
Sounds obvious right? Yet many people fail to consider speed when looking at UX. If your website is slow or unresponsive though visitors will lose patience and use your competitors instead. Increase your speed to gain better UX and improve the conversion performance on your site (shopping checkout, email contact etc). As a bonus an improved speed should also attract more visitors through better rankings.
What could it be costing me?
There’s research out there suggesting a 1 second delay in page response can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. So if you’re site takes £1,000 per day it could cost you around £25,000 per year!! Worth looking into getting the best response time possible.
What does Google think?
Visit: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
What if your site performs poorly?
Contact your web designer and see what improvements can be made to the site. If you prefer contact us to see how we can help. We can prepare a speed report for you and select key areas of improvement for you.
