Why Page Speed Matters More Than You Think

There is a quiet cost to slow pages in the form of lost enquiries and search rankings. Consider that a site which loads in two seconds will hold the attention of far more people than one requiring five. Then there is Google, which takes loading times into account when it comes to ranking your pages. Fortunately, the majority of these issues stem from a few things that are easy to put right.

Online, every second has value. According to research by Think with Google, 53 per cent of mobile users will walk away if a page does not load in under three seconds. It is not merely a matter of user frustration, it is a direct hit to your bottom line and visibility.

Speed and Conversions

You do not have to look hard for evidence of the link between conversion rate and page speed. Deloitte was commissioned by Google to run a study on retail sites and found that a mere 0.1 second improvement in mobile load time was enough to raise average order value by 9.2 per cent and conversions by 8.4 per cent (web.dev). For a smaller operation the stakes are higher still, with fewer visitors to start with, each one that is driven away is felt more keenly.

Speed and SEO

Google made page speed a factor in 2010 and with the advent of Core Web Vitals its significance has only grown. Better performance means better rankings and more traffic, which in turn brings in customers. It is a virtuous cycle.

Common Speed Killers

Unoptimised images and render-blocking JavaScript are typical offenders, as are excessive HTTP requests and a server that is slow to respond. We see many business sites carrying around megabytes of image data that could be compressed. Add in third-party scripts for chat or analytics and social embeds and the impact adds up.

Quick Wins

Make some headway by converting your images to WebP and sizing them to their actual display dimensions. Minify CSS and JavaScript to get rid of superfluous comments and whitespace. Put in place browser caching so that resources are pulled from the local cache for those who come back. Any one of these will make a marked difference to load times.

Choosing the Right Hosting

Your host puts a floor under your site’s performance. With cheap shared hosting you are vying for server resources with hundreds of other sites. A good provider or a virtual private server affords you dedicated resources. The price tag is not much different for most small businesses.

Content Delivery Networks

If you use a CDN, static assets are kept on servers in various parts of the world. A visitor’s request is then answered from the closest point rather than your origin server, cutting down on latency for those at a distance. There are plenty of CDN options with free tiers to be had.

Measure, Improve, Repeat

Get a baseline with Google PageSpeed Insights and act on the recommendations. Make a change, re-test, and then move on to the next. You should be tracking scores on a monthly basis to spot any backsliding. As your site evolves, so too must your approach to speed, not least because it is one of the three Core Web Vitals Google looks at.

Is your website underperforming? Our web development services include performance optimisation. Get in touch for a free speed assessment.