Website Speed & Performance Optimisation: Why’s It Important?
Website speed is amongst the most underestimated factors when it comes to digital marketing. Many business owners and agencies are looking so far ahead into things like PPC, SEO, and other digital marketing tactics that they forget some of the most basic optimizations which can truly elevate their website.
Your website speed is essentially one of the most important aspects of creating a good experience for your visitors. The technical term for this factor is UX, which stands for user experience. The better your UX on your website, the more chance that you’ll convert more visitors to customers, achieve better authority and rankings on the web, and ultimately grow your business more rapidly than ever. Before we begin,
Why Is Website Speed Important?
Website speed may like a very simple and basic factor; however, you’d be surprised to see the amount of failures that occur simply due to bad user experience – which website speed is a very important part of.
To answer the question of why website speed is important, we’re going to be looking at three other areas in your business which are affected solely by website speed
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- User experience (UX)
- Conversion rate
Enhance marketing offers a range of different website development and website design services, available to business all around the world. Website speed is an area of focus for our team, who works cautiously to optimize every aspect to perfection. Contact us now to get your free website analysis and get a free proposal too!
What Factors Are Influenced By Website Speed?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Google has very clearly clarified that website speed plays a direct role in your website’s SEO, especially as it is a large part of the user experience which is very highly valued by Google. Good website speed will most definitely result in better SEO results, as the pages crawled by google (crawling is basically the term used when Google’s “spiders” or robots analyse each page to give it a ranking based on a number of different factors) and indexed will receive higher rankings for the user experience category.
As expected, slow website speed will result in a worse experience for the user, which in turn also affects your SEO, potentially being an underlying reason for why your website is not achieving the organic growth it has potential for. Our website development strategy is hyper focused on achieving maximum organic growth, hence why website speed is such an important factor for us.
User Experience (UX)
As previously mentioned, website speed has a very large role in determining the overall user experience of your website. You have exactly 3 seconds to impress your visitor, otherwise you’ll most likely loose them for good. The 3 second rule is very important when it comes to optimizing your loading speed.
If your website takes anything over 3 seconds to load, there’s a very good chance that you’ve just lost a visitor. In this stage you’re not just competing to get a visitor, you’re competing to provide maximum comfortability and convenience for users.
Oppositely, a website that takes under 3 seconds to load – or preferably loads within 1 second – is the perfect starting point to hooking a visitor and turning them into a customer. Any good website design company in Australia and around the world will emphasize to you the importance of having a good website speed, especially for your user experience which determines a lot of your overall sales.
Conversion Rate
A recent study by a web design company in Australia found that every second of delay in the website loading resulted in a 7% decrease in conversions. You can see how easily you can lose a noticeable chunk of potential revenue for each second of delay. This percentage may not seem like much to you at first, however if you look at a little more scale, there’s a considerable difference.
For instance, let’s say you are converting $10,000 a day through your website, with an average loading speed of approximately 2 seconds. Now let’s add an extra second to the equation, and just like that you’ve lost $256,000. If we were to imagine that your only revenue is from your website conversions, which adds to $3,650,000 annually, then a one second delay in loading speed has just cost you around 7% of your income. (You can see that the math adds up to give the same answer of a 7% decrease as mentioned previously).
Now imagine how much more noticeable this becomes at larger scale where you’d be earning let’s say $50,000 or $100,000 a day…and so on. So, from what we’ve analysed from a number of different factors and studies, it’s safe to say that speed should be at the top of your website development checklist when it comes to optimizing for better rankings, better user experience, better conversions, and ultimately better growth.
How To Test Your Website Speed (For Free)
The next step after learning about the importance of website speed is to see whether this issue actually relates to your or not. Most websites (73% of all websites to be exact) have been shown to have below average to very bad loading speed, which is not a good sign.
You can use Google’s free page speed insight tool to get an analysis of your site speed, as well as other factors such as accessibility, SEO, and more tips. If you find that your website speed is not where it should be, then the next part of this article is a must read for you.
How To Improve Website Speed
You know now exactly why website speed is important, but you may be wondering; how can you optimize and improve it? That’s what we’re going to discuss in the second section of the article. We’ll be looking at the top ways to optimize website speed which include:
- Image optimization
- Minimizing plugins
- Reducing codes
- Browser caching
- Using a CDN (content delivery network)
Read on to see how you can improve your website’s speed with these five strategies.
Image Optimization
Images are amazing for increasing engagement and improving your website’s design, however you have to make sure they are optimized. Unoptimized images are the largest contributor to poor website speed.
Make sur your images are compressed down to the smallest size possible, without visually ruining the quality and purpose of the image. The image format which you use can also have an impact. We encourage you to use JPEG and WEBP format where possible and avoid GIF’s completely.
Minimizing Plugins
Where needed , plugins are very useful for adding unique features to your website. However, be careful to keep track of all your plugins overtime and avoid letting them stack up. Over a long period of time you may stop using some plugins which you had previously and install new ones. Having too many plugins takes up a lot of space and can decrease your website speed significantly, hence why you should keep track and get rid of useless ones for maximum speed efficiency.
Reducing Codes
Minimize the use of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML codes where possible. In cases where these codes are necessary, you can combine them all into one for their respective coding style using tools like Script Minifier and Grunt. Having a lot of codes will create more HTTP requests on visitors’ browsers, making the website speed slower from their side.
Browser Caching
Browser caching basically saves your website from requesting server information each time a visitor is on it, which fastens the website speed by a noticeable amount. Browser caching is especially useful for times when you have multiple or large numbers of visitors on your website, which can slow down the loading speed of the website.
Using A Content Delivery Network
A CDN or content delivery network increases your websites performance by making it easier to access for users in different geographical locations. To make this easy to understand, a CDN is basically the equivalent of having shop branches in multiple cities or countries, making your shop easy to access for all your customers.
A CDN is the digital equivalent of this. Your site is connected with a group of servers set around different locations, making it the default version accessed by the users closest to each region. For example, if your original website is based in Australia, you may have a visitor from Turkey. Your CDN will find the closest server which for example may be in Greece, and send your visitor to there, with a much faster loading speed.
Strategical Website Development
Whilst some optimizations are easy to make, more complicated procedures need the touch of highly skilled web developers. If you need someone to care of your website in every aspect, then Enhance marketing is the perfect choice for you.
Our website design company in Australia and around the world offers a range of website development and website design services, focused on minimizing hassle and maximizing efficiency for you and your customers.
Contact us now to get a free website analysis and a free proposal on behalf of the Enhance Marketing team. Good luck!
