How Fast Should A Website Load & How To Speed It Up

  1. In short, your website should load as fast as possible!
  2. The ideal website load time for mobile sites is 1-2 seconds.
  3. 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
  4. A 2-second delay in load time resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%.
  5. Google itself aims for under half-a-second load time
  6. A VERY SLOW SITE can be a NEGATIVE Google Ranking factor.
  7. The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections. Models predict that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.
  8. People would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load and formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.
  9. Slow load times are the primary reason visitors abandon a checkout process.
  10. In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 3s – the probability of bounce increases by 32%.
  11. In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 5s – the probability of bounce increases by 90%.
  12. In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 6s – the probability of bounce increases 106%.
  13. In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 10s – the probability of bounce increases 123%.
  14. In a recent study, the average load time for a web page was 3.21s.
  15. In a recent study, the average load time for a mobile web page is 22 seconds.
  16. For every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed, a company’s customer base saw a 1.11% lift in session-based conversion
  17. Users read fewer articles each day whilst experiencing delays loading each web page. The speed of the site negatively impacts a user’s session depth, no matter how small the delay.
  18. Two-thirds of US consumers (67%) cite slow loading times as the main reason they would abandon an online purchase.
  19. 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
  20. 40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site
  21. 52 percent of online shoppers stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.
  22. Shoppers often become distracted when made to wait for a page to load. 14 percent will begin shopping at another site, and 23 percent will stop shopping or walk away from their computer.
  23. Remember to optimize your images – the most important thing you can do to decrease download times. Load background images via external CSS. Minimize white space, line returns, and comment tags. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content. Minimize unnecessary javascript and another client-side scripting.  A technical approach to improving user experience, it seems to me, would begin with site speed.
  24. A faster site should improve visitor satisfaction levels and the number of conversions.
  25. Google might crawl your site slower if you have a very slow site (confirmed by Google).
  26. Retail and travel sites – 79 percent of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from that site again. 64 percent would simply purchase from another online store.
  27. Automotive retail sites take on average 6 seconds to load.
  28. Customer packaged goods sites take on average 6.1 seconds to load.
  29. Finance sites take on average 5.1 seconds to load.
  30. Healthcare sites take on average 5.6 seconds to load.
  31. Media sites take on average 5.5 seconds to load.
  32. Retail sites take on average 6 seconds to load.
  33. Technology sites take on average 6.8 seconds to load.
  34. Travel sites take on average 6.7 seconds to load.
  35. Improving your desktop site speed score in isolation of developing a compelling user experience, will not magically lead to BETTER rankings in Google in the short term.
  36. Ranking is a nuanced process and there are over 200 signals, but now speed is one of them. Know that ‘content’ and relevance’ are still primary. Website and page load speed may affect Google rankings, just not as much as high-quality links, good titles & content that satisfies a search engine visitors’ intent.

Your Website Needs Social Proof

Social proof – anything that indicates who is using your products or services, or why they are using them, how they are using them, when they are using them, and what they think of them. There are many different forms of social proof, and in today’s world, it is one of the most important avenues to gain new customers and cultivate loyalty with existing ones.

Back in the day, advertising was one of the only forms of communication and promotion between organizations and potential customers, but today, social proof has become one of the most important forms of promotion, and an even more important element of communication.

More importantly, social proof develops largely organically and is seen as trustworthy. In a lot of ways, that makes it more valuable than traditional advertising.

JavaScript & its potential impact on search performance

I’ll keep it simple: JavaScript is key in today’s environment as it adds interactivity to a page. By doing so, it may alter some key HTML elements that are very important for SEO. You can easily check how a page would look without JS by using this convenient tool by Onley: WWJD.

Realistically speaking, you need only one of the following tools in order to check whether JavaScript might be a problem for your on-page SEO:

All the above tools are very useful for any type of troubleshooting as they are showcasing the rendered-DOM resources in real-time (different from what the “view-source” of a page looks like).

Once you’ve run the test, click to see the rendered HTML and try and do the following checks:

New UPDATE Called – Site Diversity Update

Google regularly updates its algorithms to better provide users with search results that satisfy what they are searching for. It is truly at the heart of what Google does as with better search results, Google and its partners are able to more effectively market to its audiences.

Google Announces Site Diversity Change to Search Results

Like every update, Google makes an announcement with little detail regarding how it will impact pages and reiterate Googles best practices to be found. This coincided with an additional update on Page Diversity that offered a little more explanation from Google.  Here at Boston Web Marketing, we wanted to write a blog on the Page diversity update and how it may be impacting your websites search results.

Page Diversity

From additional industry resources and Google, itself, it was noted that this recent update was going to increase the diversity of pages that would be found in Search Results. What does page diversity mean exactly? Google referred to page diversity as pages, not from the same domain. You may have seen this in a search result in the past. You enter a query and there are multiple web pages from the same domain/ website. This is what Google wants to fix.

While this update will impact search results for pages showing up on the same search results, it is not always the case. If the algorithm deems both pages as relevant to the query, it may still register in the search result.

Sub Domains

If your website has a blog.domain.com blog set up, this may impact its search results. Googles update sees sub-domains as a part of the main domain. But again, as mentioned above regarding two relevant pages, Google reserves the right to have a sub-domain and main domain within a search result.

NGRTeam – Google Partner

NGR Team is a Google Premier Partner and has been helping local and national brands appear higher in organic and paid search results since opening our doors. If your business needs an increased online presence to increase inbound leads or brand awareness, give us a call today! In addition to SEO and PPC services, NGRTeam has web design capabilities as well. Your businesses web presence is often a first impression many potential clients and customers see due to the access provided by smartphones. Ensure those searching your business or services find you first!