Why does Website speed matter?

The slower your website loads the less people will use it.

“Performance is a feature” This article rings true over a decade later, the quest for website speed continues and is as important as ever.

What is web speed?

When you request a website in a browser your requesting a document, that document then contains links to your sites assets, these have to be downloaded, some of them will be essential and your site will not display until these assets have been downloaded and processed, then the browser has to render your site.

How quickly does your site become interactive, or UPP, user perceived performance is what actually matters to the user.

The size of the assets the site serves are important and for site authors there are a number of tools we can use to optimise assets and there delivery.

Mobile

However, the devices and networks used by users can vary widely, and since mobile devices are the most commonly used devices on the web, it’s crucial to support as many users as possible.

Conversion

This is may be less important for some sites, but for e-commerce or sales websites theres a direct correlation between website performance and conversion.

Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%

The faster your site, the better the conversion.

Google search takes page speed into consideration when ranking your site for search results.

You can check your website’s pagespeed on Google PageSpeed Insights. It will guide you on changes you can make to improve your sites pagespeed as well as SEO accessability and best practice.

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