How Website Speed Effects Ranking ?
As users, we’ve all experienced this at some point in time – it takes a long time to open a website or page. This is a classic situation that will frustrate us all and make us skip sites and look for alternatives. We expect websites and web pages to be responsive within milliseconds, making website speed very important.
Now, this situation can be disastrous in terms of user experience and an organization’s branding. Imagine going to a store where the entrance takes an eternity to open. This is precisely the gravity of the situation.
“So the logic goes as follows – speeding up your website can do wonders for your business! Improving the loading speed of your web pages is critical to your presence on the web. There are many surveys and statistics to further convince you.”
Even if the site is down or there are issues with the site, site speed is critical. hosting server. Your solution may break the user experience. Of course, your speed can’t exceed the speed of your server or your users’ internet speed, but making the right first impression on your customers is what counts, and your website speed is there for you.
How Does Your Website Speed Affect Your Business?
Did you know that even a second delay can seriously damage your business? Delays in page loading can lead to a significant loss in customer satisfaction and can seriously impact your conversion rates. Customers who are once disappointed with your website experience are less likely to come back again.
Google penalizes you and it affects your SEO
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Google and other search engines penalize your website when it loads slowly; more importantly, users decide to keep their distance from your website. Users will avoid your site, other visitors will bounce back within seconds, and in the worst case, they will decide never to buy from your site. Do you want to make such an impression on your website? No one will.
Making sure you don’t lose traffic and business is your top priority. Until 2017, your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) had little to do with website loading speed. It only matters if your website is open on the desktop. However, since March 2018, Google’s algorithm includes website speed as one of the important factors for ranking.
These days, more and more of us want to browse the internet from our phones and tablets. With the migration to mobile phones for Internet use, it’s no surprise that loading speed has become a crucial parameter in the SERPs. Along with that, Google’s Mobile First Index makes it your foundation to optimize your website for handheld devices.
Why did Google choose Mobile First Index? First of all, the first task of search engines is to improve the quality of user experience. A website that loads faster directly enhances the user experience. Analytics shows that users spend more time on a page if it loads faster. These reasons prompted Google to include Mobile First in its ranking factors.
Once you get penalized by Google, your traffic will drop dramatically. Google is essentially preventing visitors from entering your site. Not only that, but it warns them to stay away. Situations like this inspire neither trust nor loyalty.
A Slow Ecommerce Site Means Less Revenue
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Speed ​​is of the essence when it comes to eCommerce websites online. If a product display page or payment page takes longer to load than usual, there’s a good chance customer will jump to the faster site.
If speed is an issue, your business is in real danger. Slow loading speeds mean customers will not only go to competitors for better service but can annoy and even irritate your website. Can your business survive in this era of intense global competition?
A recent survey showed that almost 50% of customers doubt the security of a website when it is slow during a transaction. They are wary of the security of their personal information related to credit cards and bank accounts – and, nearly 20% of users will abandon a transaction due to speed concerns.
Customers may not recommend your website in social circles due to speed and performance issues. Word-of-mouth publicity can play an important role in promoting this negative brand image, and the knock-on effects it causes can seriously affect your business.
E-commerce giants like Amazon can also suffer from sub-par website speeds. Experts estimate that if Amazon’s load times were reduced by even a second, the company could continue to lose nearly $180 million a year in terms of profits. Experts believe that if it takes three to four seconds to load a page, it can be considered a good page load speed. Now, it might be slightly different, and in e-com, faster is considered better.
It will adversely affect your PPC budget
Another area that may suffer due to site speed is paid search. Google considers slow speeds to be a sign of a bad user experience, so your Quality Score in the Google algorithm will drop significantly.
Why is the “Quality Score” approach so crucial?
The reason is that it regulates your cost-per-click (CPC) as well as your positioning on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Regardless of how competitive a keyword is, a website with a low score and a long loading time can never be ranked #1. Also, your paid ad might not even show at all due to a low rating. The speed of your website can invalidate your budget spend.
Quality Score can be considered the highest metric while planning for PPC. Only then can you be confident that your ad is reaching and achieving its intended purpose. A higher Quality Score will give you a higher ad position and lower your cost-per-click.
In short, the faster the speed, the higher the Quality Score, the higher the ranking, and the lower the cost!
Other adverse effects of a slow website
paid to advertise
All social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others consider website speed as a basic criterion for paid advertising. Like Google, you’ll get better results for the same ad spend if your site speed is good. These social media platforms have also begun to recognize the importance of user experience. Your ads are prioritized based on how quickly your site loads.
User Experience and Conversion
You always want to attract more visitors to your website and try to convert those visitors into valuable customers. User experience is also an important criterion here. A good site speed reduces the bounce rate of your site.
Studies have shown that our attention span has been shortened from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, which means that if your website isn’t loading, your visitors won’t be waiting. They will leave, most likely never to return.
Search engines will increase the bounce rate and think your website is not good enough. You’ll also drop dramatically in search engine rankings. As we mentioned before, ideally, the page should not take more than 3 to 4 seconds to load. Here is a guide on how to reduce the bounce rate that you can work on.
How To Assess Your Website Speed
Are you wondering if there is a way to calculate the actual loading speed of your website? The answer is “yes”. Before you start optimizing your website for speed, it’s a good idea to determine its current load times. While doing this, you can also identify elements that are slowing down your website.
Your next step will be to set the performance goals you want your website to achieve. For example, our website takes seven seconds to load. This can be costly to your business, as statistics show that one in three visitors abandon a website if it doesn’t load within two seconds.
This will help you understand that you have to increase the speed of your website by 5 seconds. Also, you have to make sure to get rid of heavy elements that take too long to load. Remember, minimalist web design is the new trend. We live in a world where less is more and this is one of the best practices to speed up your website.
If your goal is to optimize the speed of your website to a decent level, you will have to make some changes to its layout, fonts, typography, content, add-ons, and scripts. Once done, this will give you a significant ranking advantage over other players in the market.
So, how do you evaluate your website speed? For this, you can use the following performance evaluation.
Google Pagespeed Insights
If you are looking for one of the most authentic website speed assessment tools, Google Pagespeed Insights is the best answer from Google.
This tool will perform a performance assessment of your website and give you insight into what is causing your site to be slow.
You can improve your website speed with the recommendations provided by Google Pagespeed Insights. You can access and use this tool from your desktop computer and smartphone.
Pingdom
This is probably one of the best tools for speed-testing your website. Pingdom offers a variety of useful features and even tracks your website’s performance history. It will give you suggestions on how to improve your website’s loading time.
The Pingdom app allows you to evaluate the speed of your website based on Android and iOS devices. You can purchase free and paid versions of this service.
YSlow
This can help graph statistics, summarize your components, and identify areas of improvement to increase your site’s speed.
How Can You Improve Website Speed?
You don’t need a professional to speed up your website. There are certain things you can do.
If you’re using the WordPress platform, you’re going to need to do a little more work with your themes and plugins to make sure everything is updated. Plugins and themes installed on your website can affect your website speed.
Developers release updates frequently to help lighten the load on plugins or themes installed on your website. When you skip updates, you’re preventing your site from getting faster. The only problem with updates is that updates often break your site.
To prevent this from happening, we recommend updating your WordPress environment to test updates before publishing them to your live website.
• Move to better hosting
As you probably already know, you can choose from more than one hosting service. Shared, managed, and VPS hosting are the most popular types of hosting services, and each has a different impact on your website.
In shared hosting, you are sharing the hosting server with other websites. Each site is allocated a certain share of space and bandwidth. When one website takes up more resources than it should, other websites suffer.
A slow website can be a sign that other people are eating up your bandwidth. Time to choose a better hosting provider such as hosting and VPS hosting.
Clean up your site (if hacked)
Many times, a website slows down because of a malware infection. Hackers can take a toll on your website because, unbeknownst to you, your website is performing malicious processes (like sending spam) alongside regular processes.
To determine if your website has been hacked, you first need to scan your website for malware. There are many security plugins to choose from, but be sure to use one that runs its process on its server.
This way, security plugins don’t overload your website. Once you’ve scanned and detected malware, it’s time to clean up your site. Typically, turnaround times for security plugins range from a few hours to a few days.
This can prove dangerous, and the more you procrastinate, the greater the chances of Google finding out and punishing your hacked site. When you are pressed for time, automatic malware removal is the best way to clean your website with the click of a button. Give MalCare’s Automatic Malware Removal a try.
• optimize image
Images are one of the main reasons why websites slow down. Generally speaking, 20% of the total weight of a web page comes from images. Overall, they have a big impact on site speed. That doesn’t mean you should stop using images.
Instead, you need to take some action, such as reducing the image size. Only use JPEG and JPG formats as they are lighter in weight compared to PNG. Many free websites can help reduce the size of images, such as Tiny PNG, Compress JPEG, etc. You can batch-shrink images that have been uploaded to your website using ShortPixel, WP Semrush, etc.
Read more : What Is Seo? How to make your website Seo friendlyÂ
• Content delivery network
A content delivery network (CDN) represents a group of distributed servers located across the country or around the world. The job of a content delivery network is to deliver content to its local end users.
When you host a website on a server, all user requests come from the same hardware. This is why the time to respond to each user request increases. Think of it as customers queuing up to be served, and there’s only one server at the counter.
The CDN server ensures that its local end users are served, so you can avoid slowdowns due to increased traffic for any reason.
• Use fewer plugins
While plugins are common website components, each of these third-party components can make your website heavier. The more plugins you have, the longer your site will take to load.
So using fewer plugins or at least reducing the number on your existing website is one of the best practices to speed up your website.
First, you have to perform a performance assessment and identify which plugins are causing your website’s slow upload times. Once you know the answer, get rid of the plugins and see the noticeable difference in your site speed
Fewer CSS and JavaScript files
The performance of your website might also be slowed down by having too many CSS and JavaScript files. Having too many of these files can lead to an increased number of HTTP requests whenever a visitor wants to access any particular file.
Reducing the number of CSS and JavaScript files will greatly increase the speed of your website. Various tools can help you quickly identify and minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
• Take advantage of website caching
If your website is constantly under high traffic, this will slow down your server due to request overload. You can use website caching, the process of storing the latest version of your website on your hosting server until you update your website.
This way, your website doesn’t need to render repeatedly, and the server can capture your website’s image in the cache and send it to the requesting user. However, you have to keep in mind that the method of using website caching will depend on the type of platform your website is built on.
For example, your website is built on WordPress. In this case, you can use W3 Super Cache or W3 Total Cache plugins to enable website caching.
If you’re using a dedicated server or VPS, you can even set up caching under the general settings there. On the other hand, if you use a shared server, no website caching service is available.
•Database optimization
You can optimize your database to effectively increase the speed of your website. Using a CMS with complex plugins and growing databases will eventually slow down your website’s performance. Therefore, you must optimize your CMS and use only the minimum number of plugins according to your needs.
Summary
We are all connected with developing website marketing awareness. Even if you’re not in the eCommerce business, you can still expect your website to generate good income. The optimal website loading speed will eventually lead to a good revenue stream.
Furthermore, all efforts to provide users with relevant information and high-quality content are in vain because visitors do not want to wait. Any delay could cause them to never see your page. Slow speeds can seriously impact your conversions and online presence.
As business owners, we are also Internet users. We all appreciate a fast and efficient website. The same goes for your users. They demand immediate and relevant responses, so the speed is a must for the health of your business.
Here it is necessary to mention the classic world marketing theory – the sole purpose of business existence is to make customers happy. In the online world, providing a great user experience is crucial and can effectively drive your business success.