More traffic to your website

One of Google's priorities is to present the best experience to its users. This means serving up sites that are properly optimized to load quickly, reducing user frustration.

Slow loading sites typically result in higher bounce rates. Visitors attempt to load a page and quickly abandon this attempt to find content elsewhere if the wait is too long. This is recognized by the Google algorithm as a quality issue if it occurs too often.

Slow loading time also results in fewer page views and can even affect the Google crawler bot (designed to index content to show in Google results) by reducing the number of pages it indexes.

Beyond the above side-effects of slow speed on search results, in July 2018, Google released a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search called "Speed Update". This means that now both desktop and mobile speed are direct factors in ranking criteria.

Google is not only explicit about the impact of speed on search results but openly promotes these standards. In fact, this website (paceology.com) is connected to the Google Page Speed Insights API, providing the data that we display as speed test results. Google recommends this exact test with a focus on mobile networks to measure your site for improvements.

This means that if you are not scoring well on the test we provide at the top of this website, chances are you have some work to do if you want Google to regard your website as a pleasant experience to present to its billions of users.

This seems to now be confirmed by a 2019 Searchmetrics study showing that the top ranking sites load faster and provide a smoother user experience on mobile.

The report shows that the "First Meaningful Paint" (the time that a site appears loaded) has a 1.19 second average on page one of Google search results and a 1.29 second average on page two of Google search results. Also, 80% of results on page one had a "Time to First Byte" below 0.6 seconds, which Google suggests is necessary for an acceptable user experience.

According to Daniel Furch, Director of Marketing EMEA at Searchmetrics:

“For anyone that has not already optimized their site speed, things are likely to get tougher.”

“The more your competitors speed up their sites, the more you’ll stand out negatively if your site is slow. And as people become accustomed to near-instant loading, any slow pages will put them off. You can expect speed to grow in importance and pages to get faster overall.”

Convert more traffic to sales

As we already present as the main headline on our website, Google claims that if your site loads slower than 3 seconds, you will lose over half of your mobile traffic.

Of course, this loss of traffic also means you have fewer opportunities for sales, dropping your overall conversion.

There have been several major businesses, organizations, news sites (including the BBC), and social media sites (like Instagram) who have reported significant gains in sales conversions by changes that decrease load time by a second or less.

Increase returning visitors

Websites that load slowly result in poor customer satisfaction. A 1-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.

Not only will you lose a significant amount of return customers, but these customers also complain to their friends. 44% share their negative impressions online.