Why Is Site Speed Important?

If you are noticing that visitors don’t stay on your site for long and are not converting to sales, then one thing that you need to check is your site speed. What is a website site speed and why is it important? Site speed can impact your ranking and can prevent visitors from becoming customers.

What Is Site Speed? 

Site speed is how fast your website loads. Your site speed is the average of your site’s individual page speeds (how fast the single page of your website loads). Free programs are available to you to measure your site speed, such as GT Metrix and Pingdom.

Why Is Site Speed So Important?

Have you ever been looking for something online, click a link, and the website takes more than a few seconds to come up on your screen? What do you usually do when that happens? If you’re like most people, you probably click “back” and pick another resource. Today’s shoppers – including you – are impatient and will only wait a couple of seconds for a site to load before they leave. Therefore, your site speed will affect how many visitors you can convert into customers because they can’t buy what they never see!

Site speed can also affect SEO – your rankings within the search engines. Google includes site speed as one of its measures for determining your site rank. And the reason it affects your ranking comes right back to the site visitors. When people leave your site quickly because it’s slow to load, it increases your bounce rate. The higher the bounce rate, the more damage to your ranking score.

How Do I Fix My Site Speed?

Several factors can slow your site down, but the biggest one is images. Make sure your images are optimized so they are not so large, especially if you have an image-heavy site. It’s easy and inexpensive to do by using services like TinyPNG. Those services compress the images without distorting or resizing them, creating a smaller file size, which will make your site load faster.

Site speed has a big influence on SEO and how many visitors will stay on your site and become customers. It may seem like a small detail, but it is an important one. Take the time to make sure your website is optimized, and you won’t have to worry that your visitors will bounce before they get to see your awesome business.