Any business with a website would rather have a fast app over a slow one, right? But, more than a matter of preference, today, a fast website is almost a prerequisite for success.
In mid-2020 Google released an important update, Core Web Vitals, a robust algorithm update that, among many new features, brought loading speed as a priority factor.
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric measures the speed with which content is shown, and sites that show efficient loading have an advantage over those that don’t show content quickly.
But, after all, why is fast charging so important? In the following topics, we list all the factors that can be impacted by the slow loading of your website. See now:
Ranking on Google
Since we’re talking about rankings, how about we deepen our knowledge about Core Web Vitals?
As we mentioned above, this was a major algorithm update, which introduced three main factors of website performance analysis:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) , to measure how long the page loads;
- First Input Delay (FID) , to measure how long the user can interact with the page;
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) , to measure content stability as the page loads and the user interacts with it.
It is clear, therefore, that the speed of the site and its loading stability have gained prominence when we are talking about ranking, is not it?
This happens because, today, there are many websites competing for the customer’s attention. And Google understands that its role is to separate sites that offer a good experience from those that do not: and loading time is one of the factors considered.
You’ve probably already searched for something using your smartphone and saw a text below the link informing you that the site for that result is slow.
The connection through mobile devices was the main influencer to place this metric in the search engine, since these do not have as fast an internet connection as computers.
This is probably one of the main advantages of improving the speed of the site, because with better positions you will have more hits and consequently more conversions.
But make no mistake: speed alone will not make your pages reach the top spot, for that you need a set of improvements, including SEO , relevant content for visitors, a good proposal, among other things.
Traffic
Yes! By improving the performance of the site you can guarantee much more visits. Much of it is due to the fact that you will have a better position in search engines, but not all results are linked to this.
With good speed you can ensure that buyers stay on your site, instead of looking for the same products in other market players.
A competitive advantage of 250 milliseconds can ensure that your site is visited over your competitor’s. You see, just a quarter of a second or the blink of an eye can make someone continue browsing your page.
To get an idea of how speed impacts your number of visits, a survey conducted on Global Dots reports that Yahoo generated 9% more traffic on the site for every 400ms less in page load time.
Conversion rate
The most important metric for any type of digital business. While there are many ways to increase your conversion rate, site speed is the most effective, hands down!
The conversion of a page has a lot to do with the consumers’ patience, as I told you before, our brain, even if unconsciously, doesn’t want to wait any longer.
Imagine walking into a physical store, I imagine you want to be served as soon as you set foot in, but for some reason it takes 5, 10, 15 minutes for someone to talk to you.
After waiting 15 minutes, your patience has run out and you leave for the competitor’s store, where they will serve you more quickly. The same happens on the web, but instead of 15 minutes it will only be 3 seconds.
All purchases, whether physical or digital, are made on impulse. When the delay is long, that impulse to complete the action is lost, lowering your conversion rate dramatically.
Also in the Global Dots survey, it is reported that Walmart obtained a 2% increase in the conversion rate by reducing page loading by 1 second and Mozilla generated 60 million more downloads of the Firefox browser per year, decreasing by 2.2 seconds on loading the site.
Consumer satisfaction
When a consumer manages to access your page, find the product he wants and make the purchase quickly, he is extremely satisfied.
A satisfied customer shares his shopping experience, defends the brand and recommends the products to his friends. Both you and I know that a referral is a virtually certain sale!
I already mentioned the physical store example, but it works just as well on conversion rate as it does on customer satisfaction. Site speed is directly linked with both.
By maintaining the good performance of your site, you create a legion of satisfied customers and advocates of your brand, capable of generating as many sales or even more than a good advertisement on the internet.
A good tip to know if your site speed is satisfying your visitors is to send an email satisfaction survey. They work very well and when you need to invest in performance, they will tell you so.
cost reduction
You must be wondering: how is it possible to reduce costs by making my website faster? There is a logic behind this and I will show you how it works.
To improve website speed you need to optimize it. This will make it use the server’s resources in the most appropriate way, decreasing the amount of processing required to support your pages.
After a good optimization, the difference in resource usage can be so great that it may no longer be necessary to use a hosting server as powerful as the current one.
So it is possible to support the same amount of people online or even more than before with cheaper hosting.
The money left over every month, you can use as a budget for ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram and others.
What makes a website slow?
Now that you know all the advantages of having a fast website, how about better understanding all the factors that may be impacting the speed of your website?
There are many features and tools that could be hurting your loading efficiency and causing your website to lose precious visitors and potential customers.
In the following topics, we will talk about the main factors that impact the loading of a website. Check out!
very heavy images
Visual content is an increasingly strong trend. Market research shows that content with images tends to perform better and offer a more interesting user experience.
And that’s no coincidence: a survey by the Social Science Research Network shows that 65% of the human population is made up of visual learners .
Despite this, images need to be used in the right way, otherwise they can become real fast-loading villains.
Images often slow down the site because they are exported with the wrong extension, with maximum quality – in web content, this is not necessary – or with a size that is much larger than the page can handle.
Heavy images take time to load and detract from the user experience. Fortunately, there are tools that can help compress them without making them lose quality. We list some of them now:
- Compressor.io ;
- Compress PNG ;
- Compress JPEG .
Many Scripts
In short, scripts are lines of code that will make website elements open correctly. As soon as you access the page, these scripts are asked to put everything in order.
The problem is that often each function is in a separate file, generating many requests that cannot be executed at the same time by the browser.
In addition to affecting the speed of the site, the Scripts will run gradually and visitors will see the site being “built” on the screen itself, which is terrible.
It is recommended that all these commands be concentrated in a single file, reducing the number of requests on the page and gaining speed in loading.
widgets
Widgets are those “boxes” with weather, radio, news or any other information that is not from the website itself and are certainly the worst enemies of performance.
These boxes don’t just make requests on your page, but also on other sites where the content comes from, it turns out that you don’t depend only on the performance of your site but on that of third parties.
This throws down site speed because the path to go through to find the information is so long, so the elements that are below the widget won’t load until it’s ready.
Try not to use these facilitators. I guarantee that your site will load much faster and because of the performance you can even gain some positions in search engines.
excessive publicity
The vast majority of content sites and news portals use advertising on their pages. This is a way to monetize all the work behind the content made available for free.
However, you need to have a good dose of common sense not to infest the site with ads, this will increase the number of requests on the site and delay the loading of all elements.
Not to mention the annoyance of the audience with the numerous ads. These people create a certain “shield” and many of these advertisements go unnoticed.
With affected site speed and an excessive number of ads, your page will be heading for the abyss, so be very subtle when creating spaces for other sites.
accommodation
If you’ve already optimized all of the causes of slowness above and your site is still slow, there’s a strong possibility that your hosting is not optimized for your site’s platform.
Of course, there are still other things that can affect your site speed, but even if you optimize everything possible, if your hosting plan is not optimized it won’t do anything.
Common hosting plans do not keep up with the exponential growth of a website or application, it is necessary to optimize the server to use processing resources and memory in the best possible way.
When you use a high-performance environment that has been tailored exclusively for your platform, you can reduce page load times by seconds!