Does speed matter? Why does my website need to be fast? It doesn’t matter if users have to wait a bit and if they are forced to download some unnecessary data, does it?
These are questions that many people may ask themselves and in this article we will answer them briefly and concisely. There are two main reasons why speed matters for a website. It’s all about user experience and search engine optimization.
A fast website makes users experience the page as more pleasant, which increases the likelihood that they will stay longer on the page. This, in turn, increases the chance of conversion. Studies have shown that 14.47% of users wait no more than two seconds for a website to load, and 15.4% of users leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.1 So, by reducing load times, you can expect significantly more users to stay on the page longer.
Speed also plays a particularly important role for the users who visit the website using mobile devices. This is because mobile connections are often slower and more unstable than landline connections. Now that more and more people surf the web on mobile, speed optimization is of the utmost importance for a website to achieve success. Search engines like Google use load times as one of several criteria when ranking websites in their search results.2 So getting a website to load fast is a form of search engine optimization.
Want to speed up your website? Contact Liberdev.