The most important part of your website is your user experience and how users interact with it. If it is not doing what it should, you won’t be seeing the number of people you ideally want.
Your website needs to be functional, easy to navigate and be fast loading to keep users exactly where you want them. When it comes to essentials, your website speed is where it counts because slow loading websites cause more people to leave than to be patient – and your competitors are the ones reaping the rewards.
With the internet being at everyone’s fingertips, businesses have a very short window of time to capture the interest of users, and if you don’t have good internet speed you will lose people within a few seconds.
Speed is of the Essence
Competition on the internet is in a constant state of growth, making it very important that you pip the competition to the post when it comes to speed.
You have around 5 seconds to retain the attention of your visitors, as the average bounce rate drastically increases between 3-5 seconds if a website does not load fully. In all ideal scenario’s, your website should be fully loaded in 3 seconds or less to avoid the bounce rate.
Another issue with a slow loading website is that your rankings are also affected. Google gives UX a lot of weight when it comes to rankings, with 3 of 4 UX signals directly related to page speed: time on site, pages per session and bounce rate. Poor performance on these results in your website slipping down the search engine listings.
Easy Fixes
If your website is loading too slow, several possible reasons could be affecting your page speed. The first thing you need to check is your hosting service.
If your website is on shared hosting, you may need to switch to dedicated or cloud hosting. Shared hosting is known to slow websites down due to sharing the same server as other websites. Dedicated hosting is faster because your website occupies its server.
Media like images, videos and animations can enhance a website but also slow downloading speeds if files are too big. Media files need to be compressed and properly sized and optimized to load quickly. You can also add some interesting functions to your website via the use of plugins, making sure not to use too many as that may also affect your loading times. Be sure to use well-optimised ones built for good web page speed.
Discussing with a digital marketing agency Stockport on the possibilities affecting your internet speed is highly recommended, as they can be a mix of simple or complicated things. From responsive website design Stockport to outdated elements occupying the space that need to be replaced or updated, engaging with specialists in the area gets you up to speed.
Contact the team at Search and More today for all website enquiries and a better user experience.
