Why is page speed
so important in 2020?

9 JULY 2020, by Dom Libert

The internet is amazing. The current technology allows us to access global information instantly and connect with anyone on the planet within seconds. However, it also lowered our threshold for waiting. A fast, frictionless experience has become a necessity, making design and technical optimisation a priority.

Photo by Kris Atomic on Unsplash Why is page speed so important in 2020?

According to Think With Google, "65% of the UK's consumers said they will switch from a poorly designed mobile site to a better alternative”. Bounce rate also skyrockets incrementally with each second of page load time, meaning that people are less likely to visit more than one page, if they had to wait a long time for that page to load. This could be disastrous, if you use your homepage as a main directory for all subpages that convert sales.

1. Bounce rates

According to Google, page loading speed may have major effect on user retainment once they visit your page. This is true for both E-commerce sites as well as regular websites; it’s a fair assumption that this effect would be magnified on mobile, due to limited hardware resources.

2. Conversion rates

According to Think with google “conversion rates can fall by 20% for each second of page load delay”. This could mean loosing two in five customers over 2 second page speed delay. The impact this has is too significant to ignore.

3. SEO impact

According to moz.com “Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.”

So not only will slow loading pages rank worse, but it will also take more time for them rank or re-rank at all, due to the negative effect on crawling. Your page can be perfect in all other aspects of SEO, but so what if you’re loosing most of your users before the page even loads?

Google’s focus as a business is to provide the best result, and that is, best to the user.

The principle remains the same throughout; page speed is crucial for good user experience, and by extension for customer acquisition and retention; thus page speed directly will affect your business. It’s too crucial to ignore, but even further it can be sometimes too easy to do to ignore. Of course, user interfaces and experience in terms of design are fundamentally important, but without good page speed the user probably won’t be patient enough to go through the paths you’ve created for them.

If you found this blog useful, we also provide an affordable Website Benchmarking service, where we look at your website and tell you how to make easy and impactful changes to increase sales. This is specifically designed for new entrepreneurs, but would benefit any website, at any stage. Get in touch if you have any other questions and we’ll be happy to help you.

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Further reading & sources

Toptal: 'UX and design thinking.'

Think with Google: 'Why expectations for 'right now' are on the rise'

Think with Google: 'How consumer needs shape search behaviour and drive intent '

Think with Google: 'Masterful Mobile Web'

Think with Google: 'Mobile page speed conversion data'

Think with Google: 'Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed '

moz.com: 'Page Speed'

Website Planet: check if your website has gzip compression enabled.

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