You hear it all around you: your website needs to be faster, because the speed of your website is important. However, announcements like this often raise more questions than answers:
Why do I need to make my website faster? Is it just for the user, or does it also affect Google results?
How do I know what the current speed of my site is, can I measure the speed of my website somewhere?
How do I make my website faster?
In this blog, VisionVpro specialists will give you clear answers to the above questions and share their knowledge on speed optimization with you.
Why should I make my website faster?
Your website needs to be faster, but why? What impact does a slow website have? Why should you invest in making your website faster?
You have your website to showcase your business to customers. With your website you want to attract customers, you want to convince visitors to your site of your expertise and persuade them to become customers of yours.
Why speed of your website is important:
The first answer to the question of why your website needs to be faster ties in with the purpose of your website: for the users.
Actually, the second answer is also “for the users,” but in this another player plays a big role: Google.
I would like to explain the importance of a fast website both for Google and for users of your website (your potential customers).
Google likes it fast
Suppose you are dissatisfied with your dentist because every appointment you sit in the waiting room for an hour, surrounded by the unpleasant sound of the dreaded drill in the treatment room. You decide to look for a new dentist.
How do you go about this? You probably choose from 1 of the 2 options that everyone else chooses:
You ask around among family, friends and acquaintances in the neighborhood if they might know a good dentist.
You google ‘dentist’ in combination with your city and look at the websites and reviews of different dentists in your area.
Probably, if you choose option 1, you will also do option 2 as a next step. What does this show? The power of Google and the importance of your website being easily found in Google.
Google’s algorithm
The vast majority of your (potential) customers use Google on a daily basis. The search engine processes about 40,000 searches every second (!) and 93% of all online experiences start with a search in a search engine. No matter how you look at it, the likelihood that your target audience is using Google is very significant.
Google’s search results are based on a complex algorithm that is regularly updated and improved. However, the goal of this algorithm is always to give the searcher the best possible answer to their search query. Google always puts the user first and the algorithm is therefore designed to be at the visitor’s beck and call as much as possible (and as quickly as possible!).
Although Google’s algorithm is not public, we do know that the loading time of websites plays a role in rankings. Since July 2018, this not only involves the loading time of websites on desktop, but also the speed at which a website loads on a mobile device. The importance that Google places on load time implies that a better load time contributes to a higher ranking in Google with a faster website.
Of course, speed is certainly not the only ranking factor; there are also many other factors that play a role in determining rankings in Google. On some of these factors you can (almost) not influence, on others you can. For example, the age of the domain name plays a role (something you have little influence on) and the quality and quantity of inbound links to your website (a point on which you can take action yourself).
The speed at which the pages of your website load (page speed) belongs to the last category: you can influence it yourself.
Impatient visitors
We already discussed this above: visitors like it fast. The really interesting question is whether the speed of your website is directly related to the conversion rate of your website. In plain language: will you sell more through your website if it loads faster?
Google has done some research and the conclusion is clear: the longer the loading time of your page, the greater the chance that a website visit ends in a bounce, i.e. that the visitor clicks straight back into the search results. According to Google, most sites lose half (!) of their visitors during loading. This is of course exactly what you want to avoid: that a Google user selects your site and clicks on it, but then drops out due to obstacles within your website.
Below you can see how many mobile visitors drop out per second of extra loading time of a website:
Influence loading speed on bounce rate Google