Page Load Time and Why It's Important
Does a website need to be fast?
The short answer is yes. In the terms of user experience, a website needs to be able to load all aspects of the website in a timely manner so the user is not waiting too long. In fact, a website should be loaded and interactable within 2 seconds to ensure the end-user has the best experience on the website.
Page load time indicates the time needed to download and view the whole content of a web page in the browser window. This parameter is also called “page speed” (speed of the page load). Page load time has calculated from the beginning, when you click on a link or type a web address, to the completion when the page is fully loaded. Is usually measured in seconds and it is formed by two components:
1. The network and server speeds
2. The browser time
Why is page load time important?
User experience is the number one reason to perfect your load time on your website when a user enjoys their time on a website, they are more inclined to stay on the website longer and are more willing to come back to the website again. Google watches a website bounce rate, this is where a user clicks on your website and watches to see if they go back to Google in a short period of time. Users tend to go back to google to search for another website if the one they clicked on is taking too long to load. Per Google, bounce rate is something that can directly affect your rankings on google.
Keeping users happy on your website is not the only reason to keeping a short load time, Google also looks at your website load time and ranks your website based on it. Google uses a particular algorithm to determine a website's positioning, and the page speed is one of the factors analyzed. That means Google guides users to faster websites.
What influences page load time?
There are several things on a website that can affect its overall load time. Starting from the server side, the allocated bandwidth and network availability are major considerations when picking a hosting provider. Other things that affect load times are:
1. The optimization of the website
2. The overall design of the website
3. The format of the pictures being used on the website, .webp extensions tend to have the best load time since they have a small file size
4. The location of the user compared to your hosting server
Do you think your website running slow? Send us a message and we can run a test on your site and let you know the biggest points that are affecting your website for free!