Ever wondered how much time you have lost waiting for a website to load? The time you will never get back! For most of today’s internet users and digital consumers, if a website doesn’t load fast enough, they are gone. Users do not want a so-so experience with a website. They want optimised and dynamic sites.
So many users are literally on the move in today’s world that they have little to no patience for waiting for sites to load on their smartphones. If you want to achieve a good user experience, UX, you need to read on.
How well do you think Amazon would have been if their site was slow to load? Amazon researched the implications for them if their site was slow, and for the Amazon site to load one second slower, it would cost them $1.6 billion every year.
A slow-loading website is annoying. No matter what your site is promoting or selling, you do not want to lose your potential customers. A high bounce rate is not the rate you want to be looking at. Why? Because not only have you lost their interest, but the users have more than likely gone to a competitor whose website loads faster.
Changing the perception of digital consumers once made is a challenge! But it is a challenge we at Freedom Search are more than ready to meet.
No Second Chances Unless You Improve Your Loading Speed
Digital consumers are a tough crowd with high expectations of how a website should perform. Their first impression of how good your website is is how fast it loads on their laptops, smartphones and tablets. If this is not happening fast enough—for some 2-second wait is too long—they leave.
Companies and businesses constantly have to maintain their sites to meet the demands for ease of usability, navigation, great design and relevant content. But however good they all are, slow loading on any device is a no-go.
You can check your website’s speed by using this website. A poor loading speed, apart from an almost instant drop in your website’s visitors, has a knock-on effect that can cause long-term problems, where people see the low loading as a lack of credibility. In addition, users stop referring due to the poor user experience, and established websites will not want to link back to your content.
A Fast Loading Website Is Essential To Your Business
Of course, in meeting the needs of your target audience for a faster-loading website, you also will be meeting Google Metrics. Google likes speed. In 2010 they admitted they considered loading time for ranking and conversions. If it takes your site to load in more than 2-seconds, it will not send crawlers to your site.
Doing this will impact your site as people will miss your latest information, product or blog. Your visibility on the Search Engine Results Page – SERPs will also go down, affecting the traffic to your site.
Google Metrics To Check Website Loading Times
One of these metrics is First Contentful Paint or FCP. This metric measures how long it takes for your website to show the most amount of content on its screen—the content measures only what you can view without scrolling. The aim is to have an FCP of 1.8 seconds or less across desktop and mobile devices.
Another helpful performance metric is the TTI, Time To Interactive. This tells you how long your site takes before users can interact with your page. Under 3.8 seconds is a good TTI score. If your First Content Paint and TTI have a large gap, it indicates a loading problem.
Keep Your Website Loading Speed High To Increase Traffic, Ranking & Conversions
A faster loading website portrays an impression of professionalism and reliability, one that the user can engage with. Research has indicated that 40% of users will leave a site completely if it takes too long to load. However, you cannot compromise content to improve speed. Therefore, the two have been harmonious.
Digital marketing is about attracting people to check out or try out your products or services. You could be a blogger or influencer wanting to connect with people, an eCommerce store selling—well, almost anything— you want customers.
Creating great content is vital for your website but if it doesn’t load fast enough, the user experience will be low, and you will waste all your good marketing content Getting professional SEO services for your website is crucial if you want to keep and grow your user base and improve your user experience.
Search engine optimisation is a multi-layered task best suited to the experts who can optimise your website to increase visibility. This means your content will contain the appropriate and relevant keywords, knowledge of the current algorithms and website speed testing to meet Google Speed Test Metrics.
There is not a one-action response. Instead, there are several ways you can improve the overall performance of your website if you know what you are doing. If you are not sure of what to do, it is best to chat with the experts.
