Why is Website Speed Important?
Today, the time spent on the internet is increasing day by day, and the digital world offers many new advantages. We can no longer tolerate anything that works slowly in the internet environment, where we can instantly access many of our needs, such as shopping, socialization, banking, and education with one click and organize almost our entire life.
Websites that load slowly, videos that freeze when we want to watch them, and pages that don’t load can turn a website visit into a bad experience. In this case, perhaps the website entered for shopping can be deleted from the browser, never to be visited again.
As Organic Agency, we discussed the importance of website speed in this article.
What is Site Speed?
Site speed, in its simplest definition, is the measure of how long it takes for page content to load. Site speed and page load speed are concepts that are often confused. While page load speed shows how long it takes for a page on a site to be loaded and ready for use, the page load time generated by the samples taken from the page views on a site represents the site speed.
Reasons for Slow Website Load Speed?
- Problems caused by the hosting service provider are one of the most important problems that affect the speed of the website. Trying to host your website in less than the area it needs, in a way, overloading the limited space you have, seriously affects the website’s opening speed. Many website owners do not want to spend a lot of money on hosting during the establishment phase of the website, and they may have problems with speed in the following processes. For this reason, when choosing hosting, we recommend that you make sure that the hosting package you choose will meet the space your website needs.
- Images uploaded to the website affect the speed. In particular, images that are loaded in high file sizes and that are not compressed or formatted increase the load time of the website. To avoid this problem, you should make sure that all the images you upload to your website are arranged in the appropriate size and format.
- The fact that you get a lot of traffic, that is, your website visitors are heavy, is another factor that affects the opening speed of the website. For example, the fact that a restaurant serving all hours of the day is busy during lunch and dinner may cause some disruptions in service. In order to prevent this, additional support may be needed at these times. You can also think of the times when the traffic on your website is heavy in this way. To avoid such a problem, you need extra space.
- Code density slows down your website and causes the site to load late.
- Optimizing your codes allows you to increase your site speed quite well. In addition, if there are unused codes on your site, deleting them is also very effective in terms of site speed.
- Many plugins are used on websites to fulfill requirements such as SEO, social media, e-mail marketing, and e-newsletter registration. As the number of plugins increases, the site speed slows down. To avoid this problem, we recommend that you identify the add-ons you really need and remove all that are not necessary.
- Although redirecting a page to another page within the site provides benefits in terms of click-through rates and SEO, too many redirects will negatively affect page opening speeds and, therefore, website speed.For this reason, carefully examine your on-site redirects and remove any unnecessary redirects. Following website updates is one of the most important requirements of a well-functioning, fast, SEO-friendly and fast site. Ready-made CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla, and Wix send update notifications at regular intervals. Following such notifications and mastering Google updates will allow you to manage your site quickly and without any problems.
CONSEQUENCES OF LOW WEBSITE SPEED
Website load speed is one of the most important factors affecting Google rankings. Many internet users do not want to wait for a website with a slow opening speed to open. This means that the bounce rate of the website is high.
Even a 1-second delay in opening e-commerce sites can mean losing 15% – 20% of users.This reduces website sales. The same situation causes fewer visits to blogs or news portals.
Aiming to offer the best and most useful search results to internet users, Google does not want to push sites with high bounce rates to the top. In addition to being negative in terms of user experience, this situation causes Google to spend more budget when crawling the website. In other words, the lower your website speed, the lower your website ranking will be.
You can fill out the form to get an analysis your website speed and get professional support to make your website faster.
