We’ve all become so accustomed to the Internet and the speed at which we receive information. When it doesn’t work, we become frustrated. In fact, studies have shown that if a website takes a few too many seconds to load, most people will just abandon the page in search of another.
For website owners, this means you have a very small window in which to convince someone to stay on your site. From the beginning you need to not only have a website that is well designed and provides engaging content, but can also load quickly.
If your website doesn’t meet these requirements you could lose out on visitors and therefore potential customers.
Page Load Speed and SEO
Your website’s speed impacts not only user experience but, your search rankings as well. Search engines like Google use many factors when determining where to rank your website in the search results. One of them is page load time.
If your website loads slowly, you are not only lessening the experience for your visitors but, they may not wait long enough to even see your website at all. Today’s standard benchmark is usually considered three seconds or less.
Improving Your Website’s Speed
To ensure that your website is loading in a timely fashion, you can easily check its speed. A great tool for checking page load time is Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
From there you simply enter in the URL you want to check, and Google will tell you if there is a problem with the load time.
Should you find that your website needs improvement, there are a few things to try:
- Upgrading to a faster web hosting provider or server
- Reducing the number of plugins used by your website
- Ensuring your website is efficiently designed
- Optimize your images
- Enable browser caching
- Minify html, css, and javascript
There are other methods for improving page load time and if you would like to find out more, please contact Evans Alliance to find out how we can help. The load time of your website pages is an important component of your website’s usability and ranking. Don’t miss out on potential clients by not being up to speed.
