Is Your Website Speed an Important Factor?

Over the last 25 years, people’s communication and interaction have changed significantly. The DOTCOM boom, which was the starting point of online businesses, has been focusing on making daily life of people easier and faster. Since then, many businesses have stepped into online markets offering a wide range of services and products. As the competition on the online market got tighter, the market participants tried to be more innovative by offering various services to attract customers out of which, providing the fastest service has always been an important factor for online businesses in order to have a competitive advantage over other market participants. As a conclusion, providing high speed services from when users visit an online business website, all the way through delivering the product or providing the requested service, is now an important factor to be considered for an ecommerce in general.

To be more specific and show you how important the website speed would be for the online business’s health and growth, we will walk you through the values a high speed website could possibly add to your business. 

• Trustworthiness

It’s a human tendency to consider faster websites more reliable. That’s most probably due to the users’ judgement that when a website loads slowly, the people who are running the website are not professional and do not care about the website quality. Once this judgement comes into people’s mind, they will generalise it to the whole website including the services that the website offers and the content it has published. Therefore, users wouldn’t trust the whole business. In contrast, when users find a website that loads fast and easy, they will trust it more, as it represents the whole business quality.

• Less Bounce Rate, More Traffic

Users hate low speed functioning websites. The majority of people who are looking for a specific topic or product, would instantly leave the website they have entered, if the website doesn’t load within a couple of seconds. This will increase the bounce rate which basically means the percentage of users who leave a website without taking any action. Obviously, when a website speed is high enough, people will stay on the website and this brings more traffic. Furthermore, if the contents, as well as website speed, meet the users’ satisfaction, the website will have more loyal visitors as time passes. This will lead to more constant traffic for your website.

• Higher Ranking on Google

Google focuses on the users’ behaviour to see how they interact with the websites they enter! Like we said before, when a website speed is low, people will leave it instantly and that would increase the bounce rate. Google is capable of identifying the bounce rate for every single website, so low speed websites with high bounce rate, will either not be shown on Google search results or be on the second or third page. Therefore, website speed plays a crucial role for better ranking on Google. 

Bear in mind that the website speed is also an indicator for search engines to evaluate your website performance. You can check “SEO Consultancy” if you want to know more about SEO services in Australia.

• Higher Conversion Rate

The conversion rate basically means to get the visitors to do something on your website. It can be making a purchase, clicking on a link or reading a whole article. The first step to increase a website conversion rate is to have visitors on the website. Once this is achieved, the longer the customers stay on the website, the more the chance of them doing something will be. As mentioned earlier, the website speed plays a crucial role for keeping the customers on the website. Like we said before, users will generalise their judgement achieved from the website speed to the whole website. Therefore, the higher the website speed, the more time users will spend on the website and consequently the more chance that they do something on the website. This basically leads to a better conversion rate.

To sum it up, all elements mentioned above along with many others, are directly associated with user experience. Hence, the website speed will improve the user experience of the website which directly improves many factors which are crucial for having a healthy website with an organic and steady growth.

Now that you know the importance of website speed, the question is, how the website speed can be optimised. The process of website speed optimisation is not a simple task to do. It requires many web design standards to be met, which is normally being done by professional web design companies. Since the website speed optimisation is a very important factor for your website to be SEO enhanced, you should be very cautious to choose the right web design company to do it for you, regardless of developing a new website or optimising the currently operating website.

Here at Websima, it’s been more than a decade that our talented team has been doing a fantastic job to optimise the website speed for many clients. The Websima team has helped many clients who were struggling with low speed websites and high bounce rate to improve and shine. We will be more than happy to discuss it further with interested clients through our free consultation meeting, so you can meet our team and understand our procedure to help you with optimising your website speed.

FAQs

How fast should a website load?

The maximum loading time for a website is three seconds. It comes down to two seconds if it is an ecommerce. If your website takes more than two/three seconds to load completely, your bounce rate will dramatically be increased as users will instantly leave your website!

How to check my website speed score?

Simply go to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and type in your URL. You will see your website speed score instantly for both desktop and mobile versions. If your website scores low, it is important to take urgent action in order to optimise your website speed.

Is it possible to improve an old website speed which is currently operational?

Yes it is! There are a few professional techniques that can be used to improve old websites’ speed. Like mentioned before, it needs to be done by a professional and experienced team of developers. 

My website speed is low. What shall I do?

In case you find out your website speed is not good enough to meet your satisfaction, you need to contact a professional web design company to discuss the issue further. Here at Websima, we would be more than happy to have a free consultation meeting with you, so we will have a better understanding of the issue and how to fix it to achieve the best possible result.