Page speed is important both for the search engines and the user experience.
The slower your site, the longer it will take to crawl; If Google has to wait too long it may well get fed up and visit less often, missing out on the latest updates to your site.
You’ve done it yourself, clicked on a page you want to read and if it doesn’t load immediately you’ve clicked on something else. Unless your site is super fast, people clicking on the link to your website are doing exactly the same thing. You only get one chance to make a first impression and this couldn’t be closer to the truth when it comes to mobile websites.
Webmasters and company owners need to give their customers and potential customers the ability to complete their full shopping or information gathering experience on mobile. The number of people using mobile devices is rising, however most conversions tend to happen on desktop and the main reason for this comes down to speed. If you are going to invest money into making sure your site renders well on mobile and then the speed lets it down, it really wasn’t worth the investment.
Every second counts on mobile, users expect instantaneous results and with 53% of visits abandoned if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load they are not hanging about even if you do have exactly what they’re looking for on your site.
Google has announced that as of July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. This doesn’t mean that your page definitely won’t be shown to the user though, if you have great content that Google thinks matches the users intent, even if your page is slow it could still rank. Studies show that even just a one second delay in mobile load times can impact mobile conversions by up to 20%!
My advise? Either work with an SEO or site developer (preferably both) and get your site speed sorted!
If you’re interested in seeing exactly how fast your site performs at the moment, here are a few tools to use. There are many tools you can use to analyse the speed of your site and as it can vary when tested from different locations, it’s always good to get an overall picture rather than rely on just one tool.
PageSpeed Insights
Pingdom
GT Metrix
WebPageTest
Google Lighthouse
Varvy
Let me know which tool you prefer and why, if you’d like some help optimising your own site then please just get in touch.
