Improve Your Website’s Speed Score on Google.

There is nothing worse than a slow loading website. Whether you’re on a desktop computer or a mobile device, you can quickly become frustrated with a website that takes ages to initially load and is slow to navigate. Website speed isn’t only important for your customers’ user experience, it also affects your rankings on search engines like Google.

A delay of just a few seconds in a website’s response time can provoke a visitor to leave immediately. Search engines want to provide users with the best experience, so website speed is part of that. Google algorithms consider a website’s response time when ranking a website, users prefer speed, which makes it an important determinant for site rankings.

Having a slow website isn’t necessarily going to make your website fall off Google entirely, but it can negatively affect your conversions and force customers to abandon your site altogether.

The real cost of poor website speed

In an experimental website redesign carried out for a year by Shopzilla, website speed increased from 7 seconds to 2 seconds, which resulted in 25% more page-views, 7 to 12% more revenue, and a 50% decrease in the use of hardware resources.

With visitors leaving your website following slow response times, chances of conversions decrease drastically. Research has found that a large share of people using online shopping websites do not return to a website with slow performance, and many are likely to give negative feedback to friends about a poor experience. Quick page loading also determines website loyalty for a significant share of people shopping online.

The above means that with poor website speed, you’ll not only lose likely conversions, but also possible future conversions that could arise from a good referral.

Mobile users are just as unforgiving, research from gomez.com and akamai.com found mobile users are likely to wait only a matter of seconds before leaving a website, and that a delay of even 1 second can reduce conversions by 7%. For a busy e-commerce website, that kind of speed loss can translate into a genuinely significant amount of lost revenue over a year.

A single second can be precious. A 1-second delay can send the efforts of your sales, marketing, and online teams down the drain, resulting in wasted time, money and resources. Improving your website speed results in increased conversions and profits, and better search engine rankings.

How can I test my website speed?

There are a number of online tools you can use to check this, including Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Google’s own PageSpeed Insights. Simply put in your website’s address and it’ll give you a load time and a score.

So what actually affects your website speed?

Server location.

To be live on the internet, your website is hosted on a server somewhere. Ideally, you want your website on a server located close to you and your target market’s geographical location, since this affects connection speed (latency), the time it takes for a visitor’s computer to connect to the server and start downloading the website. If you’re an Australian company serving mainly Australian customers, it’s best to have your website hosted on a server located within Australia. Generally, the difference is only a couple of hundred milliseconds, but it can be noticeable, especially on slower internet connections.

Image sizes.

One of the major reasons a website can be slow is that it contains large images. Two main factors affect image size: the physical dimensions (height and width) and the quality/compression of the image. For your website speed to stay fast, images need to be optimised properly for the web, ideally serving up a different image depending on the device someone’s viewing on, sized specifically for that device’s screen.