For online businesses, website speed and page load time is crucial. After all, it affects SEO ranking positions, user experience and, therefore, conversion rates. Yet every business has the potential to significantly improve the speed of their website. This can contribute to better engagement and boost your business visibility and sales.

Why, then, are so many business websites not optimised for speed performance if this can have an impact on the bottom line?

One reason may be lack of awareness – and not just from the people working in the business. It can also be that web developers are unaware of just how much speed performance impacts visibility in Google searches or how stringent Google is when checking performance.

 

Why is the speed of your website so important?

Speed is the very first thing that people experience about your brand, and if they are met with a website that is slow and unresponsive, this gives them a negative image. This means that they will not stick around for therefore losing you the potential for converting visitors to customers.

Google suggests that if a page loading time is more than one second then this will have a significant negative effect on how people perceive the website – before they’ve even read about your products or services. Unfortunately, you rarely get a second chance to impress those first-time visitors.

And it’s not just how speed impacts user experience that matters. It also directly affects how visible your website is in Googe search (i.e. how high up in the ranking positions). Google uses specific metrics to measure speed and page experience called Core Web Vitals (see this simple Guide to Core Web Vitals).

Page speed v site speed

When it comes to business growth it is important to consider both page speed and site speed. Both terms are used interchangeably but are slightly different. Page speed is commonly used as the measurement that determines how fast the content on an individual page loads to the point where someone can interact with it. For that reason, it is particularly important for your priority web pages.

Site speed or website speed on the other hand is the performance relating to the whole website. This doesn’t necessarily impact user experience but does impact ranking positions.

What to focus on first

It’s fairly obvious that a good user experience is important for any business website, but while we know that, the reality is often different. For instance, I was looking at a website recently and admiring the design and brand messaging of the site on my laptop. But when I later looked at the site on my phone, I couldn’t access any pages because the mobile responsive menu didn’t work. A basic error that someone in the business should have checked. And this was, by the way, a well-established company not a one-man band with limited resources.

So improving the load time of specific pages will be both beneficial to customers and also from an SEO perspective. But only if people can actually access those pages via a functioning menu!

 

Site speed and search engine optimisation

Site speed matters for SEO too because search engines will detect slow loading pages. This can significantly impact how well your website ranks and how easy it is for people to find your business online, and more importantly, find the parts of your website they’re looking for.

 

Site speed and conversion rates

Ultimately, site speed affects online conversion rates so it deserves your attention. Yet our auditing websites at Ditto Digital shows that many websites do not take site sped into consideration. However, this does present an opportunity for businesses who choose to solve speed issues. If your goal is business growth (and why wouldn’t it be?) you really do need to optimise your website speed.

Best practice for speed optimisation

There are a number of different techniques that can help with your speed optimisation. Let’s take a look at some:

Choose a good hosting plan

Invest in a quality hosting plan before looking at website performance optimisation. This might be a shared hosting plan or a dedicated one depending on your finances and requirements. It needs to offer you the space, optimisation and uptime guarantee you need to keep your site loading, and fast.

Caching

Combine this with a content delivery network (CDN), and the result will be a faster website, reduced bandwidth usage, less downtime, and improved security.

Optimise Images

Images are everywhere on websites, and it would be a pretty dull website that only loaded text. With image optimisation, you can deliver high-quality images that are the right format, dimension and resolution whilst keeping the smallest possible file size. Consider image compression, lazy loading, and serving images in next-gen formats such as WebP for the best results.

 

Today’s consumers are impatient. If your website is slow then they are likely to go elsewhere, which will impact both brand awareness and sales. If you want to ensure that your business grows to its full potential then you need to ensure that both page speed and overall site speed are not preventing you from achieving this.