I’ve been working on a project this past week which had me analysing nine different websites for several different factors related to search engine optimisation, one of those factors was how fast each website loads.
It’s not the most exciting topic for most people, but it is important – as Google estimates that 53% of mobile users will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
A Shopify study estimates that 74% of people will leave a mobile website if it takes over 5 seconds to load (yes… we the human race are an impatient bunch in 2020).
It’s hard enough getting people to visit your website as it is, it’s painful to think you might be losing three-quarters of those visitors just because your website takes 5 seconds to load.
Another study by the Financial Times estimated that for every 1 second delay of your website loading, your conversions drop by 7% – that’s huge.
The loading times of the websites I’ve been looking at for my project vary between 1 to 16 seconds – that’s quite a difference.
There are thankfully some great free tools out there to help you see how fast your own website is. One of my favourites is WebPageTest, which tells you the load time and ranks key loading criteria from A to F.
One of the most common issues is big image files which take a lot of loading time, you can get a plugin to automatically compress them – or you can manually compress them for free at a website like TinyPNG.
There are lots of extra benefits to speeding up your website too, it’s a ranking factor in Google – which prefers to rank faster websites higher, it also provides a much better user experience for your website visitors.
Get in touch if you have any questions around this – I’m happy to help.
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