Do you know what your website’s page speed is, and why it matters? If not, read on.
Page speed is not just something SEO pros like to geek out about.
It is something that affects every aspect of your business, from your website’s ranking in Google to your yearly revenue numbers.
In this article, we will discuss five important reasons why page speed actually matters for your company’s bottom line.
What Is Page Speed?
Page speed measures how quickly the content on your website loads.
In general, you want to make sure your pages load within 3 seconds. You can check your page speed using a free tool like Pingdom.
Here’s why you should go check your page speed right now, as well as take immediate action to improve it if it is not fast enough.
Why Page Speed Matters for Your Company’s Bottom Line?
1. Slow websites kill conversions.
If your website does not load quickly enough, it is very likely that you will lose potential customers.
For example, when Walmart’s page load time increased to 4 seconds, their conversions dropped rapidly.
Plus, 79% of consumers will not revisit an underperforming site.
Not only are you going to miss out on conversions today, but there is little chance your potential customers will click on your website again in the future.
Instead, they will go back to the search results, click on a competitor’s website, and make a purchase there!
2. Slow websites kill sales.
When people leave your site because it did not load fast enough, you are not just missing out on email subscribers.
You are missing out on revenue that could have easily been yours! – if only you had made a few tweaks to improve your website’s page speed!
This is especially important for businesses in the eCommerce industry. Time is money!
When Amazon’s page speed slowed down by 1 second, they lost 1.6 billion dollars in revenue.
How much money could you be losing just because your website does not load fast enough?
3. Slow page speed affects crawl budget.
Every search engine has bots, or crawlers, which crawl websites to determine their search engine ranking.
Each website has its own allocated crawl budget or the number of URLs the bot can (and will want to) crawl on your website.
Slow page speed reduces the number of URLs the bot crawls within the allocated budget. If your website does not load quickly enough, you will blow through the crawl budget much quicker.
This will cause your new pages to be indexed more slowly and will make it harder for your website to rise through Google’s rankings – even if you are doing everything else right.
4. Page speed affects user experience.
There are two major factors that affect user experience: giving your audience what they want and giving it to them fast!
Your page speed is the first impression the user is going to get of your website.
Before they see your awesome headline or gorgeous photos, they will judge your website by how quickly it loads.
Users associate fast websites with professionalism and convenience.
Think about your own browsing experience. How do you feel about websites that take forever to load? Do you like to go back to them? Or would you rather go find the information you were looking for somewhere else?
The bottom line is this: when it comes to providing users with the best experience possible, having a fast website is not just a bonus. It is a requirement.
5. Website speed directly affects your search engine ranking.
Google loves fast websites, and slow page speeds can affect your website’s search engine ranking in multiple ways.
We already mentioned that slow websites use up their crawl budget much more quickly, which leads to new content being indexed much slower.
In addition to that, Google will actually send fewer bots to your site if your server is slower than 2 seconds.
Page speed also matters because Google puts a large emphasis on user experience when deciding where to rank your site.
One indicator of user experience is your bounce rate, which refers to the number of people who leave your site after viewing just one page.
If your site is slow, users will be less likely to stick around, which will increase your bounce rate and lower your search engine ranking.
According to research by Compass, if a page takes an extra 2 seconds to load, bounce rates go up by 50%.
That’s a lot of potential customers leaving your site just because of your page speed!
Final Thoughts
Page speed matters because it directly affects both your website’s SEO and your company’s bottom line.
If you want to make sure everything on your website is working as it should check out our free Digital Marketing Assessment.
It includes a free SEO audit, which will help you make sure that all the technical aspects of your website are optimized for maximum traffic and conversions.
