User Experience
When we talk about user experience, we’re talking about the way that people experience your website.
It’s both an art form and a science, which is why it’s so important to test everything. We can do our best to design a site that’s easy for users to navigate, but we also need to keep an eye on the metrics to see whether our design is working.
Website speed is one of the most important aspects of user experience, because without a rapid website, people won’t be able to access the site in the first place. If we had to rank every factor that goes into user experience, website speed would arguably be number one.
The Statistics
Let’s take a look at a few statistics that show just why speed is so important for SEO and user experience. Here are ten of our favourites:
- 82% of shoppers say that slow page load times impact their purchasing decisions. [source]
- Bounce rates increase from 9% to 38% when pages go from loading in two seconds to loading in five seconds. [source]
- A 100ms delay in website load time can decrease conversion rates by 7%. [source]
- A one second delay in loading times for an ecommerce site making $100,000 per day could cost $2.5 million per year in lost sales. [source]
- The average loading time for a web page is 3.21 seconds, while the average loading time for web pages ranking on the first page of Google is 1.65 seconds. [source]
- 40% of people will leave a website if it hasn’t loaded after three seconds. [source]
- When Yahoo! reduced its loading times by 0.4 seconds, it experienced a 9% increase in traffic. [source]
- It takes an average of 27.3 seconds for a web page to fully load on a mobile device. [source]
- A speed improvement of 0.1 seconds can boost retail conversions by 8.4%, average order value by 9.2% and page views by 8.6%. [source]
- Major news sites lose 10% of their users for every extra second it takes for their site to load. [source]
SEO
Website speed’s impact on SEO is largely a result of its impact on user experience. Search engines like Google prioritize sites that deliver a high level of user experience, and they can tell if they send someone through to your site and then they bounce back to the results page.
On top of that, the loading speed itself has a direct impact on where Google ranks websites. They’ve been using page load times as a ranking signal since 2010, and it seems likely that it will continue to grow in importance as time goes by.
This is particularly true for mobile search, which is continuing to grow in popularity as more and more people use their mobile devices to access the internet. If your website takes a long time to load on people’s smartphones, don’t be surprised if it starts to slip down the rankings.
Conclusion
Unless you’re running your website as a hobby, you can’t afford to have slow loading times. This is particularly true for ecommerce, where slow loading times mean you’ll miss out on potential sales.
The good news is that you don’t have to settle for slow load times. There are plenty of things you can do, so speak to your web developer and your web hosts to find out more.
Alternatively, reach out to us to find out more about how we can optimize your website to boost speeds to improve user experience and SEO and drive more business. We look forward to hearing from you!
