Website speed – does it really matter?

Every time you make a change to your website, its speed is affected. Every new plug in, every new picture, change to server settings, or additional fun feature will affect your website speed. Although there are conscious tweaks you can make to a website to speed it up, most often the changes that happen are unintended consequences that can slow down your site. Sometimes the difference is negligible, like a fraction of a second. Other times, the difference can be multiple seconds.

But what is website speed really? What does it mean for your website and your business? This post will take a deeper look at what it means to you and your site’s success.

Consider these statistics:

• 47% web users expect a website to load in less than two seconds.

• 40% of web users will leave a website that takes three seconds or more to load.

• 14% of web users will look for an alternative e-commerce websites if the one they are on loads slow

• 88% of website users are likely to never return to a website where they felt they had a bad user experience.

So what do these statistics mean to you? Well, it means a 7% reduction in conversions for each second delay. It also means that if you’re an e-commerce site that makes $100,000 per day, that a one second delay could cost you upwards of $2.5 million in sales per year. When you look at it in terms like that, you start to understand why site speed is so important.

Many people believe that your website speed only impacts the time it takes your page to load, and that is party true. However, site speed also affects the time it takes to move between pages, the amount of time it freezes, and how many times the user sees an error message when some part of the website doesn’t load fast enough.

Google and other internet properties are getting in on the site-speed game. In 2010, Google implemented a change in their algorithm and introduced a site-speed signal. At the time the change only affected 1% of search queries; however, Google has made a point to encourage webmasters to start looking seriously at their site speed. This is undoubtedly a trend that is not going away.

Though Google gives preference to both the relevance of the page as well as its page ranking, if two sites are identical in every other way, Google is likely to pick the one with the fastest speed.

Even with Google out of the picture, the fact is users often base their experience of your site on its load time and usability. Sacrifice these and you are sacrificing your websites effectiveness.

We live in a fast-paced world, and even though 10 seconds seems like a very small amount of time, there are few people willing to wait that long for a website to load. Also, a slow load time will eventually affect your Google qualities score because Google also looks at your bounce rate (how long the person stays on your website). If a visitor to your website gets sick of waiting for it to load and leaves, then your bounce rate goes up, which means your Google score goes down. This can directly affect your bottom line.

Site speed is largely overlooked in the world of online business, but it is one of the most important ways to dominate your market and crush your competition. If you don’t know how fast your site is, it’s time you found out.

If you are website owner or web admin, here are a few free tools that you can use to calculate your website speed:

• Page Speed, Page Speed is a Firefox add-on that displays the performance of web pages and provides suggestions for improvement.

• YSlow is a tools from yahoo that makes recommendations on ways to improve your websites speed.

• Pingdom is tool set with a web based load time tester. Enter in your website URL to get a visual report of bottlenecks on your website.

• Google Webmaster Tools show website performance by displaying the speed of your site as it is experienced by visitors in different geographic regions.

These tools will help you assess the speed of your pages with a single user requesting them, but you also need to test your site for when many users are visiting. Load testing is critical to your business because speed is most important when your number of buyers is highest.

Written by Adam Chronister founder of Accelerated Freelance. Accelerated freelance is a Spokane Internet marketing firm who specialize in website design, Internet marketing, social media marketing and competitor analysis services and more.