Why website speed matters: The impact on user experience and SEO

In this article, we’ll explain why website speed is essential when it comes to user experience and SEO. You will also learn the factors affecting the website speed and some strategies to optimize your site speed. Let’s buckle up. 

What is Website Speed?

Website speed is not a single concept that determines the performance of your website. It affects what users think about your website and how they interact with it. You have to understand the differences between various speed measurements. Plus, you have to learn about the factors influencing page speed to maintain the speed.

Page Speed: Let’s say you are visiting a website’s homepage that took 2 seconds to load in your browser. Within 2 seconds, it loads all its content and resources, such as HTML, JavaScript, images, and videos. So, 2 seconds is the page speed, which is a crucial factor for user experience. 

You can measure page speed by three key metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP):  The time that a webpage takes to load the first piece of content on your browser or device screen. 

• Time to Interactive (TTI):  The time that a webpage requires to become fully interactive or ready to take user input.

• Largest contentful paint (LCP): The time that a webpage takes to load the largest piece of content, such as text block or image. 

Site Speed: Similarly, you are visiting a website where the average loading time for all the web pages on that site takes 5 seconds. Here, 5 seconds is the site speed you require for navigating from the homepage to various categories, product pages, cart pages, and so on.  

Factors Affecting Website Speed

There are some major factors that affect both page speed and site speed of a website as a whole. It will become easier for you to improve website speed by learning those factors. 

Server Response Time: This indicates the time your website’s server takes to respond to the request of a visitor. Your website will take more time to load if your server response is slow. So, it's better to get a hosting provider that offers the best server response time and loads your site instantly. 

Page and Resource Size: A page that includes larger media files, such as heavy images, can take a longer time to load. Similarly, a webpage with poorly written HTML code or Javascript can take a longer time to load. Hence, you need to minimize the size of the image and remove unnecessary codes from the resource files to improve website speed. 

Network condition and User Location: The quality of your user's internet connection and their distance from your website's server matters. It determines how quickly they can get into your website. You can ensure faster content distribution in different user locations by utilizing a Content Delivery Network or CDN. 

Media File Optimization:  Large media files such as images can significantly slow down your page loading times. Therefore, you should always optimize images and compress them to a smaller size or change their format for faster loading time. Changing the image format can also help you get a better loading time.

Caching Issues: The chasing mechanism can contribute to loading time by limiting the repetitive downloads. Your website’s server will get minimal strain while serving content if you are caching those files. 

Mobile Responsiveness: Your site will obviously load slowly on a smaller screen if it's not optimized for mobile use. You will lose traffic since smartphone users are higher in numbers if you compare it with other device users. Thus, the focus should be on a touch-friendly interface that offers minimal design and image optimization. 

The above-mentioned factors will help you take appropriate steps to improve website speed and user experience. Now, we will learn why website speed is equally important for both user experience and SEO. 

Importance of Website Speed For User Experience

Website speed goes beyond a number of technical aspects that measure the performance of a website. It greatly affects the user experience since a faster website can boost engagement, keep visitors coming back, and ultimately increase the conversion rate. So, let's take a look at why website speed is important for user experience. 

Maintaining The First Impression

The initial loading time of a website shapes the first impression a user has of that website. So, a website that instantly loads all its content impresses its users with a positive experience. It proves that you are professional and reliable in terms of ensuring user flexibility. 

If your website takes too long to load, surely your customers will not stick to it. Slow-loading sites indicate that they require website maintenance, which creates a negative impression for users. As a result, they choose to browse for other websites without even interacting with your content.

Users are so fond of speed these days that they abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. These statistics clearly indicate that you must improve website speed from the very first interaction. 

Minimizing The Bounce Rates

The bounce rate of your website indicates the percentage of users who came into your website but left after viewing only a single page. Modern-day users are so impatient that they won't even bother viewing another page if your site loads slowly. This means slow loading time is the culprit behind the bounce rate. 

Let's say you are running an online business website, which takes several pages to complete a purchase process. When a customer is landing on your site with buying interest but getting a slow-loading product page. It's highly possible that the customer will not complete the purchase process and move to another site. So, every second is important for preventing bounce rates on your website. 

Slow loading time not only causes a bounce rate but also discourages visitors from coming back to your website. Even if the customer purchases a product, you will eventually lose future sales opportunities. Their previous user experience won't motivate them even if you have rich content and the best offers in the market. 

On the other hand, a fast-loading website is like a sales mine for business website owners. People with buying intentions come in and interact quickly with different pages and complete the purchase process. They even come back to purchase more or refer your site to others. 

Influencing Conversion Rates

Website speed influences conversion rate, which indicates the percentage of visitors completing the objectives of your website. Usually, conversion happens when someone purchases a product, signs up for a newsletter, or completes a form. Users can complete these actions when you ensure a fast-loading website. 

Every second of delay in completing a task on your site can ruin the user experience. It can demotivate the customers, and they may abandon their ongoing activities. Ultimately, you will lose the sales and conversion opportunity. 

The conversion rate of an eCommerce site is 2.5x higher when you compare it with a site that loads in 5 seconds. Similarly, when a B2B website loads within a second, it has a 3x conversion rate compared to a site loading within 5 seconds. So, these examples clearly indicate that even a millisecond is important for conversion rate and revenue generation. 

Importance of Website Speed For SEO

Website speed plays a virtual role in placing a website in the top tier in search engine result pages. Search engine values user experience and prioritize websites that load within 2-3 seconds. This means website loading time directly affects the search engine visibility and organic traffic. So, let's take a look at how website speed becomes an SEO factor of a website. 

Maintaining Search Engine Ranking Factors 

Google's ranking algorithm considers page speed to be one of the major ranking factors for a website. Back in 2010, google announced page speed as the crucial ranking signal for desktop searches. 

In 2018, Google also considered page speed to be the major ranking factor for mobile searches. Furthermore, they emphasized the page speed issue with a rollout of core web vitals in 2021.  As of April 2023, Google still recognizes page loading speed as a ranking factor in search engine results.

However, these stats determine the user experience of a website by emphasizing the loading speed, ease of use, and visual stability. Fast-loading websites stay on top of search engine results since search engines focus on user experience.

Core web vitals are key ranking factors according to Google’s page experience update in May 2021. It consists of three  key web metrics, including:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Caclualtes loading performance and focuses on how quickly the main content loads in a webpage. 

• First Input Delay (FID): Calculates interactivity and determines how fast a webpage responds to user input.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates visual stability by calculating the amount of layout shifts while the page loads.

Your website has a higher chance of ranking if it meets these conditions. Conversely, your site’s rank will significantly drop with poor loading speed. 

Generating Organic Traffic 

Getting a favorable spot involves huge competition between top-performing sites with noticeable loading speeds. So, It's really hard to attract organic traffic with a slow-loading website. Search engine results pages rank slow-loading websites in lower positions, which gets a lower click ratio. 

The search engine also tracks the bounce rates and how much time a visitor is spending on a site. So, Websites with slow loading times will obviously face higher bounce rates and eventually go down. 

On the other hand, quick-loading sites have lower bounce rates because people spend more time in them. As a result, the search engine gets a positive vibe from a fast-loading site due to higher user engagement. With that, the ranking potential of a fast-loading website increases significantly. 

Currently, users are not interested in wasting their time on slow-loading web pages. The probability of bounce rate goes up to 32% when a page loading time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds. 

This means your site will face approximately a 123% bounce rate if it takes 10 seconds to load. So, a minimum of 3 seconds of loading time is mandatory to retain visitors and generate conversion via search engine ranking. 

Balancing Content Quality 

Website speed is not the only element that will determine the ranking factor of your website. Google also judges the quality of the content at first and then focuses on website speed. Thus, you can still rank higher with a slow-loading site that contains relevant and valuable content. 

We are not encouraging you to skip the fact that you need to improve your website speed. You need to maintain the right balance between high-quality content and loading speed. This will allow you to reach out to your audience with the right content at the right time when others can't. 

You will get so many websites out there competing with similar keywords and content. But you have more possibility to rank higher when you have that same content with better loading speed. This emphasizes how crucial it is to maintain quality and improve website speed to boost search engine results. 

Strategies to Improve Website Speed

You need to take the technical approach and also use tools to spot the issues that are affecting your website speed. You can ensure a smooth user experience and also satisfy SEO requirements by combining these strategies. 

Reduce File Sizes

Always compress and optimize the file size of the images on your website. You can use online tools like TnyPNG and IamgeOptim to reduce the image file size while maintaining its quality. Besides, you can use the trending WebP format for the images, which offers better image compression but enhances site speed. 

Responsive Image

If you are using responsive images, it will fit in the screen size of the user’s device. You can utilize the “srcset” attribute to offer different image sizes for various screen resolutions. This is how you can improve the loading speed of the image by avoiding unnecessary data transfers. 

Consolidate Files

Your website speed can slow down since each element and resource file of your site requires a separate HTTP request. But you can cut down the number of HTTP requests. You can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files into a single file to minimize the number of requests. Moreover, you can inline the critical CSS and JavaScript to improve website speed. 

Utilizing Browser Caching

The caching mechanism allows browsers to save resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript on a user's device. Thus, you don't need to download the resource file repetitively while revisiting a website. You need to utilize solutions like Cloudflare or a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and properly set up the cache headers.   

Reducing Server Response Time

The time to first byte (TTFB) calculates how fast a browser takes to get its first byte of data from a webpage upon request. To minimize TTFB, you can get a reliable hosting provider with better server performance. Besides, you can optimize server-side code and database queries to improve website speed.

Note: Hire a professional website speed maintenance service if you are unable to implement these changes on your site. 

Ideal Tools and Resources For Speed Testing

The right tool can identify the performance issues on your website and offer improvement suggestions in a glimpse. As a result, you can quickly and effectively make adjustments to improve website speed and performance.  

Google PageSpeed Insights: This free tool is a popular option that gives you valuable suggestions for webpage optimization. You can separately focus on improving all the core web vitals of your site for both mobile and desktop devices.

GTmetrix: This tool offers every detail on how fast your webpage is loading and where you need improvements. It represents the data using charts and performance scores that makes it easy to comprehend. 

Pingdom Website Speed Test: You can utilize the user-friendly interface of this tool to test your page loading speed for different locations. You will get performance scores and breakdowns on your site's loading time. Plus, the improvement suggestion will let you tweak your site to improve page speed with minimal effort.  

Wrapping Up 

Fast-loading sites affect user experience by offering flexibility to users so they can complete their tasks on your site. It ensures your site sends positive signals to the search engines so they can reach out to visitors more frequently. 

We have presented the importance of website loading speed for both user experience and SEO. It will help you learn why you need to care about improving your site speed. Plus, our mentioned strategies and tools will help you take a DIY approach to optimize your site speed.