How Will Site Speed Affect your Website's Performance?

You might not realise it, but site speed will make a huge difference to how much business you might get from your website.  Site speed is becoming a very important factor for SEO and conversion. With increased online competition and internet users with decreased attention spans, it is absolutely imperative that your website loads quickly and correctly. Not only will site speed affect a user's decision on whether a visit to a website should be prolonged, it will also affect whether that user ever visits the site again in the future.

In fact, site speed affects many different aspects of the website's performance, ranging from sales and user experience to search engine positioning.

Reduced sales potential

It will hardly come as a surprise to you that up to 79% of customers are far less likely to buy from a website that takes ages to load. As everything in this tech-savvy world gets faster, it's vital that you and your website don't get left behind.

User and mobile experience

Customer experience and mobile experience are incredibly relevant to what a visitor thinks of your website's performance. For example, a page that takes 10 seconds to load correctly has fewer chances to be visited by the user again, as opposed to one that takes just 2 seconds to load. Indeed, up to 64% of smartphone and tablet users expect a website to load in less than four seconds. If yours doesn't load that quickly, they are highly likely to go elsewhere.

Search engine optimisation

The speed that a page loads will also affect the level of traffic to your site; even just a one second delay in page load times can result in up to 11% loss in page views. Likewise, the introduction of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) by Google is proof on its focus on site speed. Still in its infancy, this feature looks at speeding up mobile versions of websites and is becoming increasingly popular with users when it's available in search results.

What can you do about your site speed?

There are plenty of things you can do to optimise your website's speed. The first thing you need to do is test it; you can do so at Google's specific testing page. This will also measure the mobile performance, another key thing when analysing your site's performance. We would also recommend that you reduce the use of heavy images and scripts on the site and remove any unnecessary plugins that can slow sites down from time to time.

However, the most important thing you need to do is make sure that the web design company you use specialises in fast and correctly loading websites. At the Smart Domain Group, we design and create stunning websites for small and medium sized businesses across Kent and the rest of the UK. We use the latest technology and the extensive expertise of our team to create websites that are proven to load quickly, whatever the device. If you would like any more information about our web design services, do not hesitate to contact us on 01634 810600.