Why is website speed is so important?

In the current climate, it’s important to have a beautifully designed & functional website. But another just as important factor, speed, is often an afterthought. Website speed is important for two reasons. Firstly, it is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. This means faster loading and performing websites will have an advantage over slower ones when getting on to that coveted first page of a Google search. It’s no secret that the top 10 results will generate the majority of clicks. Secondly, page speed is also important to user experience. Websites which take longer to load have a higher bounce rate, meaning users who enter the site leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the site.

From the above graph, we can see that the average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!

We can conclude that page speed is of great importance when it comes to directing traffic to your website, as well as keeping users on the site and hopefully making them a customer!

The most common causes of slow pages are bulky images and poorly designed coding. Web pages these days are filled to the brim with images; if these aren’t being optimised, you can have pages that take up multiple megabytes of space. Google’s benchmark data shows that the best practice for page size or weight is under 500kb. At DEENCE, working in-hand with our web hosting, our websites are custom built to load quickly and deliver the content to your user in rapid speeds. A custom built lightweight website will always load quicker than an equivalent WordPress website.

PBG Electrical is a recently launched website designed and developed here at DEENCE. Above, using Google's PageSpeed Insight tool, we can see the website achieved an almost perfect page speed score. This is a result of using the best coding practices and our super fast web hosting. Below is an unnamed site developed on the WordPress platform. It achieves a poor score as a result of the excess bulky code that WordPress requires. Ultimately, this will damage the websites ability to rank high in search engine results and keep users on the site.

Remember that for every second you shave off of load time, you’ll boost customer confidence and trust in your site, and sow the seeds that will encourage them to tell others about you.

If you're in need of a super-fast website, get in touch and we'll help you out!