In this post, we are asking why is page speed important. We explain:
User Experience
When it comes to optimising your website there are a variety of different areas that you have to optimise in order to give your customers a good user experience. As you know when you’re sat in a restaurant or fast food place you don’t want to have to wait too long for your food and if you did feel that you had waited too long you might not go to that restaurant again. This also applies to a website, if people are stuck waiting too long for your website pages to load, not only might they not use your site again but they might just give up and leave altogether.
Organic Rankings
Not only does page speed benefit your users but it is also likely to benefit your site’s organic rankings. As many people know Google is all about user experience and they do their best to put sites that provide a better user experience higher in their rankings than websites that don’t and page speed is a big part of this. Page speed is not the only factor when it comes to organic rankings and it is also not the biggest one but if you and one of your competitors were fairly similar in a lot of areas but you had a faster page speed this may be the deciding factor in who Google ranks the highest. Page speed can also effect your pay-per-click campaigns and reduce conversion rate.
How can you improve your page speed?
As Google is all about user experience, here is a handy tool that not only allows you to check your page speed but it also tells you exactly what needs to be fixed on your site. The tool can be found here http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and all you have to do is type in your website URL and click analyse. This will give you the results of the page speed for both mobile and desktop and should look a little something like this. It doesn’t matter what platform you use whether it’s Shopify, Magento or WordPress, page speed is an important ranking factor for Google.
If you then click where it says show how to fix (pictured above), you will get even more specific advice about what exactly needs to be fixed (pictured below).
Summary
As you can see page speed is a vital part of creating a good user experience for your customers, which should be the first thing you think of when it comes to creating your website and not only that but it has the added benefit that it could potentially increase your websites rankings. When Google is giving you the information you need to fix it free there really is no reason not to improve your page speed unless you want to get left behind your competitors.Speak with a SpecialistGet a User Experience AuditIt
