Chances are, you’ve been browsing on the web and come across something that either wouldn’t load at all or was loading so slowly, you gave up and clicked Back. Even if your own website isn’t that slow, did you know that just a couple second delay in load time can impact your traffic and search engine rankings?
According to Yoast.com:
Google’s latest research shows that the chance of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s. 1s to 5s increases the chance to 90% and if your site takes up to 10s to load, the chance of a bounce increases to 123%. That’s incredible. For search engines, better results and performance is a sign of a healthy site that pleases customers and therefore should be rewarded with a higher ranking.
Also, Google has recently gone on record saying that page speed will be a ranking factor in its upcoming mobile-first index. Details on how they will evaluate page speed for mobile and calculate rankings are still unknown. But, what we do know doesn’t change much from what we at Yoast have been saying for some time: make sure your site is responsive, as fast as possible, solidly structured, and full of excellent content.
Did you catch that?
Google’s latest research shows that the chance of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s.
3 seconds! People are 32% more likely to leave your site if it takes 3 seconds to load. That’s a really significant number.
So, we’ve hit on the why – what about the how?
It’s actually pretty quick and easy to test your own website’s speed using a tool that Google created. Ready? Head here and try it out:
Is your page speed likely affecting your traffic? Contact Thrive now and we’ll come up with a plan.
