Why website speed matters - 3 reasons it's important

Want to learn why website speed matters for websites like WordPress, Shopify, WIX, and others?

Before learning about website speed issues such as what causes it to load slowly and the best solutions to speeding it up, one should first understand the importance of speeding up website pages to load faster.

Short on time?

Fast website speed matters because of:

• Users' experience and conversion rate( very important)
• Ranking high on Google and Bing
• Savings on website hosting fees

Have more time?

Enjoy the entire read below for more details on why you should make your website speed load faster.

Here's why Website Speed Matters

Why does website speed matter answered below.

1. Users experience & conversion

A reasons why the speed of websites matters articles won't be complete without mentioning this secrion.

The speed of your web pages is very important as it has a direct effect on its user's experience which leads to better conversion such as calling, filling out a form, subscribing to services, etc.

Most users don't have the patience to tolerate a slow loading website and as a result, will switch to another website thereby leading to higher conversion and lower bounce rate for that website.

When the popular auto review website Edmunds took its website loading time from nine seconds to 1.4 seconds, its revenue increased by 3% and page views-per-session went up to 17%.

Shopzilla dropped latency from 7 to 2 seconds, they increased their revenue by 12% and page views to their website jumped to 25% when they improved their site speed.

All of the above shows that fast loading time is extremely important for the conversion rate of a website.

2. Better ranking on Search Engines

A fast site speed also plays some impact on that website’s Search Engine Optimization(SEO) performance.

It is actually a ranking factor confirmed by Google. Now, how much the impact is no one really knows. Most experts believe that it is not that much but still beneficial to keep your site loading time fast.

We believe that it only matters if you have a site with a terribly loading time 4> seconds. We also believe it is indirectly affected by the time that people spend on your site and the bounce rate. Which goes back to the user's experience.

The reason why site speed is a ranking factor on Google, especially on mobile searches is that the site speed is a sign of a quality website with a good user experience.

The user will stay on a site for longer if the site is fast.

Also, Google ranking algorithm favors mobile-friendly sites which means that you need to ensure that the site is fast on mobile phones.

Fast loading website make it easier for search engines like Google to craw and index your website faster and reach other pages. It makes life easier for search bots.

The speed of your site has an impact on paid search and can affect your cost per click (CPC).

This is because Google will find your website's landing page for a search term and examines your user experience and assign a score.

This score determines your CPC and your average position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Facebook too favors high-speed sites when it comes to showing ads on Facebook platforms.

3. Hosting services savings

This is why fast web pages speed matters article won't be complete without having this section.

Contrary to popular belief, most websites, including medium businesses don't need expensive hosting plans.

If you optimize your website for speed and security properly you probably won't need the so-called expensive web hosting plans that are fast( again this is mostly for small sites with little to no traffic).

Well-optimized web pages on a shared hosting plan with providers like GreenGeek, BlueHost, or WPEngine( WordPress sites) are enough for most websites.

To achieve this get ride tools and CPU guzzling garbages in your database such as:

• Leftover tables from deleted plugins( sites that use plugins)
• Autoloading every _options tables
• For those using CMS like WordPress, avoid plugins that create a lot of tables on the database( we once used Clearfy – WordPress optimization plugin and disabled ultimate tweaker by Webcraftic, and it created over 30 tables which all autoload. Even when the plugin was deleted, the tables were still left in the database)
• Steer clear of WP plugins that reduce speed if using CMS that uses plugins

So instead of always upgrading to the next hosting plan as a lot of web hosting companies will tell you to do when your website loads slowly and your CPU is high, optimize your database thoroughly to decrease server loads.

And fix other issues causing it to be slow.

REFERENCE: https://www.onlinebusinessconsultants.net/fix-a-slow-loading-website/

Need help speeding up your site?

The challenge for a lot of businesses is that improving website speed takes time and requires expertise in website databases and related performance optimization, etc.

So consider hiring a professional speed optimization expert who can manually optimize, know the fast plugins to use( for WP sites), remove junk from your database, optimize your server, etc.

Why should make your website pages load faster recap

We hope that you enjoyed reading this short article and it answered your question, why does website speed matter.

There are a lot of benefits to having a website with a fast loading time.

If a business, blogger, etc, wants to enjoy all the benefits such as better conversion, better SEO crawling and indexing which helps with higher ranking, and reducing website hosting cost, they should strive to keep their site pages speed fast.