Why does website speed matter?

When you are building a website, you focus on building stunning looking web pages, which will appeal to the user and enhance their experience. You have the right idea and having these functionalities and features will enhance their user experience, but one of the major things to focus on is the website speed. 

The online competition is growing on a daily basis and brands are trying very hard to give their customers and users the best experience possible. So, in this emerging and fast paced competition, you will need to make sure that your unique experience is delivered to the users. But, that will not be possible if the website and web pages take a lot of time to load. 

As of January 2023, there are nearly 200 million websites currently being hosted all around the world. A whopping 300,000+ hosting providers are currently active which makes it possible for these websites to become online and do their business. These hosting service providers have been responsible for the speed & performance, security and uptime of the websites. 

Distributed across the type of hosting service, these are the stats:

Shared Hosting ~ 31%

Dedicated Hosting ~ 30%

VPS Hosting ~ 21%

Cloud Hosting ~ 18%

Why Does Website Speed Matter?

When the website is being designed, generally, all the ideas are crammed into a perfect looking webpage, because people want to display their ideas and make it according to their expectations. But, most of the people forget the repercussions of this. The biggest flaw is that if the website speed is not high enough, the webpage and website will not perform as it should, and the user will not get a good user experience. 

You should optimise the website and its pages for maximum speed and performance keeping these benefits in mind: 

Great First Impression

When a new user visits your website, they are only visiting for a few seconds. This is the only time you will have to catch their attention. In these few seconds, they decide whether they want to stay further or not. If the first impression is great and has made any kind of positive impact, then only the visitor would choose to stay. So, always keep in mind to have a minimalist page, which delivers a great first impression rather than having a chunky page, which takes too long to load. 

Keeping Users On Page

Gone are the times when it took minutes for an image to load on a website. Nowadays, with faster speed internet, users do not wait for the images and content to load, they simply exit the website. 

The average new user will spend about 3 seconds on a website, if it takes more time to load. After that, they will simply quit. This is true for most of the online shoppers, where they admitted to quitting the website if they faced any issues related to website speed.  

Better Ranking on Google

Google likes not to disclose their algorithms, however they have always emphasised on website rankings depending majorly on website speed. From a complete user perspective, the results on the first page of search engine results are enough to answer any doubt, query or shopping needs. Everyone who owns a website wants to rank on the first page. And here is where website speed comes into play. It will be nearly impossible to rank on the first page of search results if the website speed is low. Content is important on any website but more importantly is the speed with which that content can become accessible to the user.

More Sales and Conversions

Around 40% of the users admitted to quitting the website if it took more than 3 seconds to load. Let’s say that your website gets 10,000 visitors per month, and 4,000 of them quit because of slow loading speed, you would have lost a substantial amount. When you have a business website, these lost users which could generate revenue for you are lost forever. And these losses can harm your business more than you can understand.  

Building Brand Trust

When users see that you are taking good care of your website by providing all the required updates and great loading speeds with good content, they will also feel that you will take good care of them. A well-designed and fast paced website usually reflects the service it offers. 

How to Check Your Website Speed?

There are many tools which can be of great use for web developers when it comes to website speeds. These tools will help you measure the website speeds, and some of them might even allow you to see the pages which are having low speeds, and what is the issue which is causing those low speeds. Many of these tools are free and are available online. 

You can use a number of tools or a combination of these tools to get a better picture and understanding of your website performance. 

Here are some tools which allow you to measure your website performance: 

GTMetrix
Pingdom
WebPageTest 

What Affects the Website Speed?

We have discussed the importance of website speed and how you can measure them using tools to improve the performance. Now we will look at the factors which affect the website speed. You can tune these factors to increase the speed and upgrade the performance of your website. 

Page Size/Weight 
Each and every element that you insert on your webpage carries some weight. It includes themes, images, plugins and even text. You would want to input HD images and fancy plugins on your website to provide a great visual experience to your user. But first, make sure to check the current speed and optimise the pages to improve performance. 

Server Location 
Logically speaking, the closer the hosting server is to the user, faster will be the website loading, if all the other factors remain the same. If the hosting provider supports a high-connectivity network, the location of the server won’t make much of a difference.

Hosting Plan
A reliable hosting provider and its hosting plans will have a much greater impact on website loading speed as compared to an unreliable service. Also, VPS and cloud servers are getting more affordable, and the plans which offer these solutions will deliver improved performance, even for high traffic websites. These servers will help improve the performance of your website and increase loading speed even with high traffic and visitors. 

Conclusion

We hope that you have understood the importance of website loading speeds and how it will have a positive or a negative impact on your business. Building stunning websites based on your idea is a priority for everybody, but website loading speed should be one of the most important factors to keep an eye on. Otherwise all the hard work that you have put in the development of the website will not bear its fruit.