You may have a beautifully designed site, but if it loads too slowly, kiss your users goodbye. People don’t like to wait, especially on the internet. With attention spans shorter than ever, you have just 10 seconds to grab your audience according to the Nielsen/Norman Group. If your page takes five seconds to load, you’re already halfway to losing them.
Nielsen also found that a load time increase from one second to five seconds resulted in a bounce rate increase of 90%. Research on mobile users by Google found attention spans even shorter, with 53% of mobile users leaving sites that took more than three seconds to load.
Along with user bounce, Google penalizes sites with slow load time. The company released its Speed Update in 2018, announcing that “page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”
You can find a complete list of factors used by Google to evaluate page speed on their PageSpeed Recommendations and Rules page. You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to diagnose your site’s speed. The tool is simple to use. First, insert your URL and click Analyze. The tool then provides a rundown of each element currently slowing down your web page. Make it a habit of frequently utilizing PageSpeed Insights to continually optimize your page for maximum speed.
