Website Speed More Important Than Ever

Posted on: Tue, 16/07/2019

With attention spans seemingly getting shorter by the day and user expectations higher than ever, the need for a fully-optimised website is greater than ever before.

Of course, having a proper functioning website is essential in any event, but recent studies have shown that users are growing increasingly impatient as lighting-fast alternative options pop up all over the place.

A Google study done last year found that loading speeds on mobile sites had dropped on average by seven seconds. That’s great, right?

Well, unfortunately it still took mobile sites on average around 15 seconds to load. That’s not so great, especially when you consider that more than half of site visitors leave if a page hadn’t loaded after three seconds.

Now, when you consider that an emarketer study in May claimed that, in 2019, Americans would spend more time on the mobile devices than on television for the first time ever, the need to properly optimize your website becomes even more apparent.

Google has also admitted that site speed plays a very important role in the Search algorithms, so the faster your site, the better your chances of coming out near the top.

Unfortunately, not everyone’s doing it right: “We [Google] did an analysis of 11 million mobile ads’ landing pages spanning 213 countries. That analysis confirmed our thesis: The majority of mobile sites are still slow and bloated with too many elements.”

So what can you do to decrease your website’s load-time?

Google has some simple advice: “Simply compressing images and text can be a game changer: 25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB that way.”

In fact, Google has some very helpful benchmarks for your site to achieve …

  • 3 seconds: How long your page should take to display content
  • 1.3 seconds: Average time to first byte
  • Less than 50: The number of individual pieces of content needed to display the entire mobile page
  • Less than 500KB: The total size of the mobile webpage

The message is clear – optimise your website now to reduce page load-time and keep your users happy. Even if you increase your load-time by one second, that is one second that won’t result in a lost user.

Got a question?

Our expert team are on hand to answer any queries you may have. Contact us or fill in the form below and we will get back to you. 

Website Speed More Important Than Ever
Image courtesy of Google
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