Low website loading speed is not only a serious annoying factor for the user but also one of the reasons for the low position of the site in the search results. Pages that load in more than 3 seconds are automatically lowered in search results. And no matter how much time and effort you direct to other vectors of resource modernization, it is almost impossible to get to the top without speeding up page loading.
Now we’re gonna tell you how to check the page load speed, what factors have a strong influence on it, and, most importantly, how to increase it to acceptable values. Let’s start!
Why to increase your website loading speed?
According to research group DoubleClick, more than 53% of users leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, every next second increases the number of failures by 5-7%. That is, if your site takes 7-8 seconds to load, the bounce rate may exceed 80%. This is especially true for the mobile version. These are critical numbers that say that the site needs to be optimized and accelerated urgently.
Note! Starting in 2021, Google is introducing new factors for assessing site quality – Core Web Vitals. One of these factors is the speed at which content is rendered on the site. Plus – the waiting time before the first interaction with the content and its stability.
The lower the website speed, the lower the site will be in the search results. But how does it work in practice?
Site indexing with poor speed
It’s an open secret that search robots have a certain time limit to visit sites. And if during this time the materials do not have time to download completely, the pages are simply not indexed. Thus, the speed of loading a website page directly affects whether it will be included in the index and will not drop out of it in the future.
Ranking and site positions
The performance of a web resource is one of several hundred metrics. But this does not diminish its importance, because it is the speed of the site that largely influences the behavioral factors. The site takes a long time to load – the user leaves, the bounce rate grows, and the statistics are poor. And this directly affects the ranking, which we have already written about separately. The higher the bounce rate, the lower the position in the search results.
Five types of speed of access to the site:
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One second is a great result.
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Two–three seconds is great.
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Four–seven seconds is passable but worth speeding up.
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Eight–ten seconds is bad, the site needs optimization.
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Eleven seconds+ is unacceptable, urgent action is needed.
But there is an exception! For some resources, increased duration of access to the site is acceptable. For example, if we are talking about large online stores, image galleries, or news portals with an abundance of pictures, animations, videos, etc. Here, the download speed cannot be very high in principle.
