What impact does page speed have?

by Alison Weir-Smith, 02 Mar 2018

You might be tempted to sacrifice page speed for the sake of a fun animation or a better resolution image. DON’T! When it comes to web development, page speed is a major factor in how well your website will convert and how high your bounce rate is.

How slow is too slow?

Google has revealed that a second of delay in rendering a webpage can decrease your chance of converting that visitor by as much as 20%. Based on that – if your website takes longer than five seconds to load, especially on mobile, you are not going to get leads.

If you really want to see what kind of impact your page speed can have on your website, take a look at the new tool released by Google: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/mobile/#calculator 

You can use Pingdom to check your site speed and Google Analytics to see your average monthly visitors and your conversion rate. Then chat to your sales department and find out what your average sale value is. Give all of that information to the calculator and you can see on a sliding scale the financial impact a second or two can have on your bottom line.

What does Google think?

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.
Google

Google does not confirm much when it comes to their ranking algorithm, but they have confirmed two things:

  • Speed matters. Site speed is definitely a ranking factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. 
  •  Google is moving towards a mobile first ranking index – and that means even more speed.

Over and above this, Google does not want its crawler to waste time on slow sites. So if your website is slow, Google is going to limit the number of pages it will crawl. This means that some of your pages will take ages to get indexed. If you are doing SEO on your website this could be catastrophic. If Google does not know about the amazing article you just posted on your website it can’t rank that page and no one else will know about that page either.

The net effect?

If your website is not mobile friendly, Google is going to rank you lower than your competitors whose websites are mobile friendly and super speedy. If your website is slow, it is not going to be judged mobile friendly since people on phones are usually in a hurry. They have used their phone because they either do not have the time to check on a computer or they do not have access to a computer right now and they need the information right now.

So – a slow website means

  • Lower rankings, especially on mobile
  • Higher bounce rate, because visitors got tired of waiting for your website to load
  • Lower conversion rate for the same reason 

All in all, it should be pretty evident that a speedy website is a necessity while a slow one is a liability.