Importance of Page Loading Time
Are you impatient? If you are not, your customers are. If you want to increase revenue, you need to increase your website speed. How you can improve your website speed?
Page speed or “page load time” is the time it takes for all of the contents on a specific page in your website to be fully displayed.
Why is Page Speed Important?
When a user clicks through to a page on a website and it takes more than 3 seconds for the page to load, the user will most likely leave the page and look elsewhere.
Really, it is slow or grow. Speed has never been more important than what it is right now. All of us have got increasing expectations. We’re browsing the web, we’re expecting things to load really quickly. How annoying is it when your Netflix stops and starts spinning and waiting for it to load? It is annoying. So more than ever, we have to really look at our website speed and how we can improve it.
Google have got some data around this, and they say that if it takes more than three seconds for your website to load, you’re likely to lose more than 50% of the people coming to your website. They also said that for every second that your load time increases, your conversion rate is likely to go down by at least 20%. Crazy right?
For mobile sites, the ideal page load time is 1 to 2 seconds. Abandonment rates go up to 87% if it takes more than that. Bounce rate increases to 32% if the load time takes 3 seconds and it jumps to 90% if the load time goes up to 5%.
According to Guide2Reserach, 58% of ecommerce purchases made in 2020 were conducted using mobile devices. This is why mobile page loading speed is as important as mobile responsiveness.
How to Improve Page Speed
If you are not familiar with coding, or you are using a website builder, it may be difficult to determine what is causing the delays in the loading times of your website’s pages. Google relies on Page Speed Insights data to determine your website speed and you may use this tool to determine your page loading speed and which metrics are affecting your loading time. The tool will show your opportunities to improve your site speed such as properly sizing your images, removing unused JavaScript, changing the format of images, and changing video content to gifs.
Page Speed Insights Metrics
Here are some of the metrics that you will see in Page Speed Insights:
FCP (First Contentful Paint) — This is when your browser renders initial information on content such as images, background images, text, non-white canvas, and scalable vector graphics
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — A measurement of the time it takes for the largest bit of information on the page to load.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — Have you ever went to a site and while you are looking at the content, the layout changes and ads show up and then the paragraph you were reading moves somewhere else? This is cause by elements on the page that take longer to load and is measure by CLS.
FID (First Input Delay) — The time it takes for a page element to load when a user clicks it.
There are a lot of other metrics and elements in Page Speed Insights and looking at the data may turn out to be a daunting task. But speed really does equal revenue. Faster page loading time improves user experience, which will in turn cause increased page views and later one, increased conversions. Google wants a site with low bounce rate and if Google likes your site, that means you are on the right track to ranking.
A lot of web developer sites offer amazing visual builders but as far as hosting goes and structure goes, 90% of these platforms do not offer faster loading speeds. Check out MonsterFunnel and see for yourself how fast our platform loads.
