Why Have A Speed Optimised Website?

How vital website speed is to your Marketing strategy & online visibility

If you own an online store, then you should understand just how vital website speed is to your digital strategy and online visibility. How fast your website is during navigation has a significant impact on SEO rankings (both desktop and mobile app), Google paid ads, and of course, user experience and conversion.

The effect of a slow website goes from high bounce rates, fewer number page visits, and ultimately low conversion rates.

When you have a digital business with a complex conversion funnel where there are pages and several steps, you need website speed optimisation to aid users to get through it. Nobody likes to wait for a website to load.

So, we’d be discussing how much impact website speed has on different digital channels.

Website speed for SEO

With Google’s Mobile First Index already in use, mobile site speed has to be optimised. Why? It’s a Google ranking factor and a sign of premium user experience. Google understands that users will stay longer on sites with the faster loading speed, and they’ll convert better, and bounce will be kept on the low.

A page that loads within 3 to 4 seconds or even less is considered for good ranking and user experience. However, this depends on your type of site and business. If this load time is exceeded, the ranking might fall.

Website speed for paid search

As regards PPC and website speed, it depends on paying the best price for your keyword, which is determined by your quality score. How much relevance Google attaches to your website landing page to a search query is its definition of quality score for paid media. If a user can get to your page from a specific keyword very fast, Google rates it as a quality user experience, and your quality score is rated high.

The quality score determines your site’s position on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). A low site speed and quality score can make your ads not to appear in the two top positions on the SERP or not even appear at all. This is how relevant the quality score is to Pay Per Click (PPC).

When your website speed is low, the rate of conversion will be poor, and the bounce rate will be high. These are things that do not encourage sales drive or leads, hence, the need for website speed optimisation.

A top metric to consider for PPC is the quality score; it determines if your ads will work or not. An optimised quality score will put your ad at the top position and result in a lower cost per click. Most importantly, when your site speed is high, you can be confident of a high-quality score, and you’ll go up in ranking while paying less.

Website speed for social ads

Social handles like Facebook, for instance, encourages high site speed as they believe in giving users the best result for their search query.

Following the algorithm change carried out by Facebook some years ago, it’s now obvious that website speed and user experience will determine if your ad will be considered relevant or not. A number of factors may be important for Facebook’s social ad algorithm, but a high website speed will increase the priority on the newsfeed while a low speed equals lower priority on the newsfeed.

What’s the point of having a website that doesn’t drive traffic and more importantly generate sales? The emphasis here is on providing quality user experience, which in turn leads to conversion. Do you know that user experience impacts paid social, paid search and SEO? This is the reason site speed is essential as it affects the user directly.

People would not like to visit a page that loads forever! Website speed determines if a user will come back to your page or not. Naturally, site visitors will bounce off a site with low speed and stay on sites with faster speed; that’s how it works. Please bear in mind that a ranking factor for SEO is bounce rate. Make it important to have a low bounce rate by having page speed optimisation.

Why would people convert if they’re bouncing off your site? You cannot have conversions with low website speed that turns users off. What could even make matters worse is when your website process for conversion is long. Before a page finish loading, the user has lost interest even before they get to the final point of checkout.

If your page gives result for queries faster, people will continue, but if it takes time to display search result, users will have time to change their minds and bounce off.

A website that’s fast and easy to navigate is an appeal to the purchasing decision of users and can drive them to the point of conversion. Now that you know what could happen with low site speed, it’s time you optimise for the best of online marketing.

In improving your page speed optimisation, the first important step is finding out the performance of the present speed. This analysis can be done with different tools. It might interest you to know that these tools are free and you can run a large number of reports.

We use Google site speed tools as our major tools for this evaluation, and they include the GTMetrix, Pingdom, and PageSpeed Insights. The procedure is straightforward and has to do with running an automated analysis of your site URL. This will generate a detailed report that shows what your site speed looks like and what to do for speed optimisation in WordPress.

There are a lot of features and options on GTMetrix that makes site optimisation hassle-free. This tool will give a clear summary of your site performance based on key indicators of page load speed. It also has a scheduled monitoring approach that checks page performance and visualises it using interactive graphs. That’s not all. GTMetrix will set up alerts that will signal poor page performance. You can even analyse your site on a mobile device with this tool. All it will do is run your URL via an Android device to access real-world performance data on your page load. Above all, it can optimise a fast page load time for all your users on desktop and mobile.

Pingdom Tool

Pingdom, on the other hand, combines synthetic and real user monitoring for best online appearance and problem-solving.

The synthetic monitoring works by creating a model of your users’ interaction with your site so you can know when important pages are not working well. With its unique page speed analysis, you can fix low load time and give users the best experience.

Real user monitoring, on the other hand, helps you access the interaction and experience what actual end users are having with your website.

As a digital marketer, Pingdom gives you the advantage of getting to know before anyone else if your site is slow or unavailable, or when your site loading is faulty. Real user monitoring is comprehensive monitoring. Depending on the platform, device, and browser your users are using, they’ll have a different experience with your site.

Web hosting providers, web developers, IT and web operations can benefit a lot from Pingdom.

Whichever measurement options you’re using, you can use the report obtained as your basis before effecting optimisations. After updating, you can run the analysis again to check how your site is doing. Common updates include disabling plugins that are inactive, resizing videos and images.

Evaluate the general user experience on your site

Before executing site speed optimisation in WordPress, take a look at some user experience metrics as it helps for a better site functioning. The answers to the following questions can help in this analysis:

• Is the page still having loading problem and can users interact with it?
• Are site interactions hassle-free, natural and not lagging?
• What’s the server response? Was the navigation started successfully?
• Is there enough useful content users find appealing and engaging?

Asking yourself these questions will help you understand the end-user perception of your site workings and how and what improvements should be made. This will drive user experience to a great height. When you blend website speed with design elements, your site will look better, generate traffic and conversion.

Ways to improve your site speed

Your website may contain some elements that don’t allow the page to load faster. These things need to be taken out for optimum site speed. Here are a few ways to boost site load time:

• Reduce landing page redirects, link shorteners, and plugins
• Employ a premium content delivery channel to get quickly to your target audience
• Use multi-region hosting to enhance the response time of the server
• Files should be compressed to lower mobile rendering time
• Take out render-blocking javascript
• Ensure your website content at the top of your pages leads the fastest

A lot of websites are cashing in on the benefits of site speed. Should you need WordPress speed optimisation services, reach out to us today.