Page speed has always been important in web design. Back in the days of dial up, developers had to be very careful about how they laid out pages and used media, CSS and JavaScript. With the introduction of broadband over the last 20 years, internet speeds have increased to astronomical levels allowing developers to create more complex, media rich and engaging web pages.
However in that process, certain principles and disciplines were lost. It became acceptable to write inefficient & sloppy code. This went largely unpunished until recent times, but Google and other search engines are now placing much more emphasis on page speed in how it ranks your site in it’s search results.
Clients expect your website to load in a speedy fashion. They won’t wait around for pages to load – they’ll go elsewhere. If your website has a good page speed you’ll immediately build a strong first impression.
Fast page speeds have a direct effect on improvement of bounce rate (bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who don’t view more than one page on your site before leaving). Studies have shown that visitors will leave your site when the page they wished to view does not load within a few seconds.
Most importantly however, Google places huge importance on website speed. Their view is that the internet should be very fast, easily accessible and highly useful and their recommended load time is less than 3 seconds. If you have a slow website, this will have a negative impact on your Google search ranking.
Is your website slow?
To test your website speed, put it through the free website speed tests below:-
Google Page Speed Insights tool – https://pagespeed.web.dev/
GT Metrix – https://gtmetrix.com/
If your site is scoring badly on these tools, we can help and have helped a number of clients improve their load times.
