How do you feel when you come across a site whose load times are supersonic speed? Does it enhance your experience, excites you? Certainly yes!
People love sites whose Page speed is supersonic speed. Highly page load times increase the user experience to a great extent.
You may say that, as the world is developing everyone has got decent Internet speeds and page speed does not matter now.
But however, remember that 20% of the global Internet users are still in slow network connections. If you’re not concentrating on page load times then you’re missing that part of the traffic to your site.
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Why Page Speed is Important?[/caption]Why Page speed is important?
Most of the SEO gurus, say that decrease your page load times. But have you ever wondered what’s the importance of decreasing page load times?
That’s the exact thing that I’m going to describe in this post.
Increased user experience
As I said earlier, people love sites whose speed is high. As the Internet connection speeds are increasing day by day, the patience of the visitors to wait for the web page to load is decreasing.
If a web page takes more than 3 to 4 seconds, then you’ll lose a visitor.
Once a visitor comes to your site and noticed that the page load time is speed, then the next time if he comes across your site in SERPs, then he definitely, happily click on the search result and opt your site among this plethora of sites.
Increased Google Rankings
The main motto of Google is to deliver accurate and quick results to the user queries.
You may know that site speed is one of the major ranking factors of Google. Keeping this in mind, quality content and speed page load times help you get more rankings in Google. I already stressed the importance of quality content in my previous posts.
However, this is the first time I’m talking about fast page load times and its role in search engine rankings.
Think of a site whose content is unique and superb, and the page load times are painingly slow. Does it enhance the user experience? Certainly not. A site with moderate quality content and fast page load times gets high rankings because it has a great user experience.
Therefore, it makes sense to Google that placing a site with high page load times lower in their SERPs.
Better Crawlability
Search engines have a deadline time or crawl time budget (depends on the quality and trust score of the site) within which it should crawl a site. If the page load times are slow, then the search engines may not be able to crawl the site efficiently and completely.
If the search engines are able to crawl your site faster, then it has enough time to analyze and fully understand your content of your site and rank them accordingly.
Decreasing the page load time, may result in instant crawling and indexing of your new blog posts.
If there is an increase in the number of page crawls per day and decrease in time spent in downloading web pages in the Webmaster tools account, then it’s a good sign. There is increased chances of increase in your ranking.
Increased mobile user experience
Mobile users’ patience is less when compared to desktop users. Most of the mobile users have slow Internet connections, or if the mobile data connection is fast, it is limited, especially in developing countries.
The percentage of the visitors browsing the web are increasing by 10% year to year. It itself shows you that how important is that to optimize your site for speed load times in mobile. The mobile user experience of your site should also be given equal importance to that of the desktop user experience.
High conversion rates
You may have realized the importance of high conversion rates if you run a site that sells products or if yours is an affiliate site.
More conversion means more money.
More conversion rates are only possible with sites that have faster load times. Below is the graph that gives you a clear view of the co-relation between page load times and conversion rates.
Credits: Web Performance Today
Final words
Fast page load times are beneficial in every aspect as far as SEO is concerned. Fast load times increase user engagement, traffic, and reduce bounce rates of your site. Reducing bounce rate should be one of your major SEO strategies. These days Google and other search engines are stressing more and more on On-page SEO optimization including bounce rates and average page visit duration, etc.
In the case of larger sites like Amazon, Walmart, etc. Even adecrease in one-second page load time results in loss of millions of rupees and buyers.
You can decrease the page load times, by reducing the JavaScript, compressing images effectively, using cache plug-ins, using content delivery networks, etc. The main goal of your site should be to enhance user experience. I will discuss this in one of my future blog posts.
I think you have realized the importance of fast page load times. Do share and comment, if this post has helped you.
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