Why is website speed so important?

April 5, 2022     5 min read

Page speed, what is this and why is it important to your website, why should you care, lots of others don’t?

To be honest, it is great when others do not care, because when you do, and you realise it is so important, you then take advantage of something so many don’t.

Would you like to be the site that people stop and look at, the site that people are happy to browse around and pick up more information about your business, your services, or products?

Having been around the Internet and the WWW for several years (25 to be exact at the time of writing this). I recall back to a dial-up modem, to getting an ISDN line fitted at 128kb, wow, that was fast then. At that time there was not as much competition for websites, sure we had the boom to bust of the .com bubble. The reality is that having a fast website then was not so important, sites were pretty basic then anyway, and the most adventurous thing was some animated gifs or some javascript that made things change colour. Pretty pointless really, the big thing was about providing information.

Broadband came into play, well in most places, though some still do not have it and as we all know within the UK, it is a bit of a postcode lottery to whether you can get a good speed along with what time of day it is.

With the advent of broadband came greater expectations though, our pace of life started to change, when we could wait days or even weeks for a response we were now expecting it straight away. If someone did not answer a message of a call immediately it was a worry as to what was wrong, what is happening. Sad really and over the years it has not got better if anything even worse.

What has all this to do with website speed though? Well as mentioned broadband increased and with it expectations of faster delivery, which included website page speeds. If you take a look at your browsing habits and be honest with yourself, how long do you wait for a site to load before reaching for the back button?

Now think about how fast your site loads (go on check it, I dare you) and is this acceptable to your standards, I’ll throw some stats in a bit further down the page, I don’t want to sway your judgement right now.

If someone does not stay on your website they are never going to read that amazing description you have written about your services or marvel at the great imagery you have used. They will be gone and unlikely to return. The only time someone will wait is if they know there is nowhere else to get want they need, ‘Supply & Demand’

The purpose of this article is to help you as a site owner, at the end of the day (apart from it getting dark) it is your business we are talking about. For me, as you are not a client of ours I could not care how fast your site is, that’s just the way it is.
If you could keep more visitors on your site that has to be a good thing, right?

Let’s just put a hypothetical scenario together; You have just spent thousands on an SEO campaign and even more on a marketing drive with a social campaign. This has led to new pages being created with great content, you have spent hours writing and helping with new articles, etc.

Launch day the campaign goes live and the visits start racking up, great success loads of new visitors…or is that the case?

You look into the figures and see that only 1% of visitors stayed on your site longer than 30 seconds and of that only, 10% visited the pages you wanted them to. To make it worse you only took 0.5% in conversions of that 10% of the 1%. Okay, lots of figures all of which mean nothing, apart from it shows you’ve probably spent thousands on something which has not worked.

If you drilled down to the root cause, you’ll find a lot has to do with page speed and the fact that with it being too slow you lost most of your traffic. In the above scenario, it made you one sale from 2000 visitors. What if site speed could give you a 400% uplift in conversions right through each stage.

There is no point in spending thousands on articles and marketing if no one is going to see it. What you need is an expert company who can host and support your site and that is all they worry about.

What is page speed?

So how fast should a web page take to load?

As internet speeds have increased the time a user will wait for a site to load has decreased dramatically. Today anything over three seconds is taken as being slow, the scary thing is google site speed stats show that only 2% of websites currently load in under 3 seconds. Chances are yours is one of those that falls into the lower bracket.

What does this mean to you though here are some more stats?
The first is the time to load and the second is the percentage of lost traffic

• 0 – 1 seconds: 7%
• 1-2 seconds 6%
• 2-3 seconds 11%
• 3-4 seconds 24%
• 4-5 seconds 38%
• 5-6 seconds 46%
• 6-7 seconds 53%
• 7-8 seconds 59%

It continues to rise until you get to 11-12 seconds losing 67% of your visitors.

Another little stat from Google for you; showed that on average on a test of over 5 million sites it took 10.3 seconds to load on a desktop browser and 27.3 seconds on a mobile device. I’ll let you make your mind up with those, but it shows there are many very slow websites out there and a lot of them are modern ones.

Mobile speed optimisation is so important and this comes down to doing a few things within a site but also the speed of the server itself. As of writing this at 12.50 GMT on the 2nd of May, I did a speed test on one of our sites using lighthouse a tool available in Google Chrome.
Our site showed 0.7s Time to interactive

That is not to boast and say look how good our sites are, it is about saying that speed is very important, even with those figures it shows there are areas to improve though sometimes you do get different readings and recommendations from different testing agents.

So why is page speed so important?

Users

If a website is quicker to load then your visitors are more likely to become users and as said before increase your conversions

Search engines

I left this one to the end, it is important for your rankings, Search engines want to ensure that the results it provides are beneficial to their customers. Their customers are not those who pay for AdWords, they are the searcher, the person browsing, so the better results they can produce the more time a user will spend on their search engine, and, by doing this create more conversions for them through the AdWords spends.

‘Conversions, conversions, conversions’

This is why page speed is so important, so if your site is not performing, don’t sit there and wait, do something about it.