Member-only story
Website
Is Your Website Loading Slow?
Page speed load time is one of the most important factors Google looks at when ranking websites. It has only become doubly critical as Google started to index mobile-first, meaning your website must load quickly for smartphones if it hopes to rank well.
A website’s page speed is the average time it takes for it to load the content. We’ve come a long way since the days of “buffering” videos. We don’t even use that word anymore! Technology has done an incredible job speeding up the internet so we can watch the next YouTube video without waiting.
Always think about what Google wants to do when someone makes a search query. It intends to serve the best, most relevant results quickly. The keyword here today is “quickly.”
Study after study has shown that our patience has dwindled. If a web page takes even half a second too long, you can lose many visitors as they click the “back” button. You can lose visitors before they even loaded the page.
Amazon’s sales are directly affected by page speed. If even they are a second slower, they potentially lose nearly 2 billion dollars a year. That is how vital speed is on the web.