One of the many ranking factors that Google has identified is the speed in which a site is able to load. Back in 2010, Matt Cutts, one of the lead software engineers in Google, confirmed that site speed would be something that the Google search engine will be looking at when serving search results to its users. It wasn’t going to be a huge impact since other ranking factors like relevance and topicality still had more weight, but site speed would definitely improve the quality with which users browsed through the Net.
Higher search ranking
Since 2010, there has been a signal in Google search ranking algorithms: site speed, which reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and Google has seen in their internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like Google, their users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why they’ve decided to take site speed into account in their search rankings. They use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
Visitor Experience
For a customer (it’s likely happened to you too) that wants to purchase something online, it’s very frustrating to land on slow loading website. A blazing fast website, will keep your visitors happy, engaged, which will directly influence conversions. If a visitor doesn’t get what he wants in a time he/she thinks it’s reasonable, they will probably head to another website belonging to a competitor. As today’s users expect a fast and streamlined web experience, you’re losing business if you neglect this often overlooked aspect.
Better Developer Experience
As developers, we often go through the HTML source code of the website, access the server (e.g. Apache, NGINX) logs that has the HTTP requests, and have to sometimes solve code conflict problems (e.g. between plugins) due to poorly written code. By preventing unnecessary files to load, having less HTTP requests, and cleaner HTML code, you will be able to easily go through the code (which is smaller). Your log files will take less space on the server, will be easier to backup and analyse, and by having less JavaScript files loading, you will be reduce the changes of getting less JS errors that could interfere with the functionality of your website.
Higher Revenue
Just about any major retailer is taking site speed as a very important factor for increasing conversions. According to Strangeloop, 57% of online customers will leave a website after waiting 3 seconds for the page to load. Moreover, 80% of those people will not return to that page. Some of them will tell others about their negative experience. This has a direct impact on the conversion rate, revenue and brand image.
“78% of users say they’ve felt STRESS OR ANGER while using a slow website.”
“44% of users say that slow online transaction make them ANXIOUS about the success of the transaction.”
“4% of people have THROWN THEIR PHONE while using a slow mobile site.”View “This Is Your Brain On A Slow Website” Infographic
How to increase your website speed?
Being clear why speed matters, optimizing your site should be a priority and can be done in different ways. You could start taking a website speed testwith a tool like Google Page Speed Tool. The speed score and results are detailed for mobile and desktop and you also get a diagnostic and opportunities for optimizations that can speed up your website load. The opportunities are related to the following tasks:
- Defer offscreen images
- Efficiently encode images
- Eliminate render-blocking resources
- Defer unused CSS
- Minify JavaScript
- Check plugins and optimize code
- Serve images in next-gen formats
- Check the analytics code running on your site
- Check scripts and fonts
- Use caching optimization systems
- Perform an SEO audit.
Even if you find many plugins and services to perform individually all these optimizations, you can boost your speed in a more simple way. Dartspeed is a Cloud service with the ability to perform automatically more than 20 optimizations accelerating your website to the 3 seconds or less.
