How fast should your website load? As fast as it takes to get a 90+ Google PageSpeed Score. That’s the general marker for search engine performance, conversions, and user experience.
Page load time is how long it takes, in seconds, for a webpage to be fully loaded and displayed by the browser.
Page speed is one of the most important web performance factors. This factor affects bots and people alike. It needs to be taken seriously.
Load time affects a website’s SEO performance, user experience, and conversion rate. The goal should be to have it load as quickly as possible.
If you aren’t sure what your website’s page speed currently is, use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool to find out. A score above 90 is ideal.
According to Google, a 90+ PSI score is considered good, a range of 50-90 needs improvement, and below 50 is unsatisfactory.
Translating that to seconds: a page load time of under 2.5 seconds is good, 2.5-4 seconds needs improvement, and over 4 seconds is bad.
For an optimal user experience, your website’s content should have a near imperceptible load time. This can be a little tricky to pull off.
The little things matter when it comes to digital performance. A practical target is to try to keep load times under 2 seconds.
Those of us who obsess over digital performance tend to forget that most people are not as digitally savvy.
So, here are some quick averages:
With 10.3 being the average page load time, with a few tweaks your website can easily blow the competition away.
Google knows how short our digital attention spans are. Google uses page speed as a search engine ranking factor.
Your website’s speed affects its appearance on all search result rankings across desktop, mobile, and ads. Its bots won’t show users a page that they’re more likely to bounce from.
Google checks your speed based on historical chrome user experience reports and real-time tool checks.
How long will most users wait for a site to load? 53% of mobile users won’t wait over 3 seconds for a mobile page to load.
And with Google’s shift to mobile-first ranking, it’s even more critical to get this right.
Google trained a deep neural network to evaluate bounce rate and conversion data. Here’s what it found:
Google’s neural network also found that bloated web pages take longer to load.
In short, for the best user experience, you want to keep things fast, lean, and stripped down.
The majority of web searches are on mobile, with voice search creeping up.
Overall, for every second of mobile page load delay, conversions drop by up to 20%.
Smartphone users need instant gratification. If not, they’ll go to a competitor.
Over half of all web traffic comes from the mobile channel, yet most sites are still poorly optimized for it. Desktop users aren’t immune either:
This behavior cuts across all industries. Slow load time = higher bounce rates.
And increased bounce rates = lost revenue. For an e-commerce site making $10,000 per day, dropped conversions due to a one-second delay can cost $2.5 million over a year.
Website speed optimization is an entire field in itself. We’ll focus on an overview of some common reasons your website might be slow.
Web hosting is an open industry. Bad hosts with un-optimized servers are a leading cause of slow load times.
Caching lets browsers save static copies of your site. When a user visits a page, the browser displays this cached version instead of reloading the entire webpage in order to speed up the process.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of cached sites. Browsers receive cached information from the server closest to them, not the originating one.
JavaScript and Flash bloat sites and increase load times. Add these in with extreme caution.
Large, uncompressed, unoptimized images add too much file size to websites. Bulkier image formats like PNG eat up bandwidth.
Many CMS platforms can be terrible for speed and performance. The plugins which give them functionality can also make them bulky.
With all that covered, how can you get your website speed up to the ideal 90+? Here are some tips:
Following these steps should get your website up to a good loading speed. But do keep up with the latest web tech changes. Metrics, measurements, and ranking factors are continually shifting, along with consumer behaviour.
Most website speed optimization is highly technical. It’s worth getting your site professionally analyzed. Yet, even micro improvements in speed pay off in dividends.