How fast your website loads is important if you want other people to see it.
Why? Every second your customers are delayed waiting for your site to load - you're losing money.
According to Neil Patel, "If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year".
"2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second."
Maile Ohye, Google
One - two - three.
If your site hasn't loaded in that amount of time, your visitor is gone. Probably never to come back.
Another problem with a slow loading site is search engine ranking.
Google checks about 200 different factors to determine where your site will rank for a particular key word or phrase. If you're the only veterinarian in Anytown, USA then Google doesn't have much choice. If someone searches for "veterinarian in Anytown, USA" your site will show up (probably).
But if your business is one of many similar businesses in the area, you need to do more to rank well in the search results. Page speed is one of the most important factors.
"Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we're announcing that ... page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches."
Your options -
Okay, you just checked your own website and it seems to load pretty fast, so what's the big deal? Well you've probably checked your website before and some of it is cached on your computer or phone. That means it didn't have to download those pieces before it could start displaying the website. Someone new to your website doesn't have that cache, so you'd better hope they have patience.
Your other option is taking the time to optimize your website. There is an updated tool that can help you determine what to do.
Here are some things you can check with Google's tool:
- The speed of both the entire site and of individual pages
- Whether the site/page speed is faster or slower compared to the prior month
- Whether the site speed/page speed ranks Fast, Average, or Slow
- How the site speed compares to others in the industry
- The potential impact of site speed on revenue
- A detailed list of recommended fixes to increase speed on up to 5 pages on the site
Go check your website now at: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite
Give us a call for help in speeding up your site if you get a poor grade - and especially if you get an "F" (gasp!).
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