It’s common knowledge that page loading speeds are a critical element of any digital marketing campaign. You’ve established an online presence with your website, but you must ensure the pages load quickly. You know this is the right thing to do as it seems obvious – though are you aware of precisely why fast pages are crucial? Following on from this, what constitutes a “fast” web page?
We’ll provide the answers to both of these questions in this post, so you can work on developing your website and reaping the benefits of fast page loading speeds.
Why are fast page loading speeds important?
We can identify two main reasons fast page loading speeds are important:
- It plays a role in search engine optimization
- It affects your conversion rate
If you spoke to an SEO expert, one of the first things they’d do is run an audit of your website and check the loading speed. Spotting slow pages and improving their speed is a quick fix to boost search engine performance.
Why? Because Google priortizes sites with the fastest loading speeds. It’s all about pointing the user to the most user-friendly site. A website that takes too long to load isn’t user-friendly at all, so it gets bumped down the rankings.
From a conversion rate standpoint, countless studies show that the faster your pages are, the more chance they have of converting. We found a huge report from Portent that shows ecommerce sites had a conversion rate of just over 3% when page speeds were around 1 second. This dropped to under 1% for page speeds at the 4-second mark.
If you want the highest conversion rate possible, your pages need to load quickly. Another shocking stat shows that your bounce rate can increase from 9% to 38% when your page speeds go from 2 seconds to 5 seconds.
Users will leave your website if things don’t load quickly, so you can’t make conversions. You must work on improving your page loading speeds – which can be done fairly easily when you look into it.
What loading speeds should you aim for?
Knowing why fast pages are important is one thing, the bigger question is what is considered “fast”?
Well, the quicker the better. If you can get your pages to load within 1 or 2 seconds, then you’ll be laughing. Up to 3 seconds isn’t too bad – and the average page load speed is around 2.5 seconds on desktop. If you’re within this region, you’ll be fine.
Try to avoid going above 4 or 5 seconds as that’s generally when you start seeing the adverse affects, like a higher bounce rate and lower conversion rate, plus a poorer search engine performance.
All in all, you should make page loading speeds a top priority for your marketing strategy in 2024. Make your website run better and it will yield positive outcomes. You’ll be one step closer to improving your conversion rate, which can mean you’re a step closer to making more money and growing your business.