A website’s page-speed is something that is often overlooked when managing a website, but it’s more important than you may think.

We’re going to look at exactly why page-speed is such an important aspect for customer engagement, as well as your lead generating ability. You’ll also learn about our favourite tool for managing page-speed, and page-speed fixes you can implement today.

Why page-speed is so important:

1. User Experience

One of the main objectives of your website is of course, generating leads. To do this, you need to ensure that you provide your users with the most positive user experience possible. A visit to your website is often the very first contact a potential customer has with you or your company, so you’ll want to to ensure that your website has got your back.

A slow page-speed can leave users frustrated and disinterested, resulting in them exiting your site, and you losing the chance to develop a business relationship with them.

This is pretty much common sense; but numerous case studies have been executed to determine the exact extent to which page-speed can benefit your bottom line.

SOASTA has done such research, which you can see here. They’ve discovered that businesses can increase their conversion rate by 27%, by simply improving their page-speed by 1 second.

As can be seen, page-speed has a direct impact on your business’ bottom line. So at the end of the day, Google will be kinder to your rankings, which should ultimately lead to more conversions.

2. Google’s Mobile-First Update

Since studies have confirmed that the majority of Google searches take place on mobile phones, rather than desktop computers, Google has decided to implement a mobile-first index.

If you’ve never heard of Google’s mobile-first update, that’s okay. After some delays by Google, it’s planned to be implemented next year – but preparation needs to start as soon as possible.

The mobile-first index essentially means that Google is going to ‘judge’ a website’s quality based on its mobile site, rather than its desktop site. This is where mobile page-speed begins to play a role.

It’s difficult to say exactly to what extent mobile page-speed will have an affect on your website’s rankings, but most believe that it will play a critical role.

Our favourite tool for checking page-speed

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a really useful free tool offered by Google which lets you know if your website has any page-speed issues, as well as where the problems lie.

You can paste your URL into the search bar, and within a few seconds a score out of 100 for mobile and desktop will present itself, along with a list of all the techincal page-speed issues that need to be fixed. The exact resources that need to be fixed can actually be downloaded straight from PageSpeed Insights, and implemented for your website.

How to fix your page-speed issues

Fixing page-speed issues can be tricky business, which you might want to leave to your web developers. There are some areas of fixing page-speed however, that are easier than others.

Here are some examples of common solutions to issues websites have which affect their page-speed:

• Optimising images
• Eliminating render blocking JavaScript and CSS
• Minifying HTML, Javascript and CSS resources
• Browser Chaching

If you’d like to have a go at fixing them yourself, one of the more common fixes is optimising images for your website.

Why would you ever need to do this? The file size of images are often formatted in such a way that increases the loading times for those images. PageSpeed Insights automatically compresses the file sizes for those images, which you can download directly from the PageSpeed Insights website.

Once downloaded, you can replace the original images from your site with the optimised ones. But just make sure to backup the originals, just in case.

Overview

Take a minute to check the page-speed of your website with the tool mentioned above. If there are some obvious page-speed issues, make sure to ask your web developers if they can sort it out. You’ll want them to start with the issues that can make the biggest difference first, and work their way down the list.

At the end of the day , what you really want is to make sure that your users enjoy using your website in order to keep them browsing for as long as possible. In doing this, they’ll have the opportunity to determine if you can help them with whatever they’re looking for.

What might seem like an insignificant website factor, really could be affecting your bottom line. So be sure to tend to it as soon as possible – it’s definitely worth it.

Tags: Pagespeed, SEO