A well-designed space immediately portrays that your business and brand cares about the small details and that you want to contribute something fun and meaningful to your customers’ lives.
The use of high-quality content has become an essential ingredient in creating awareness, building trust, converting leads, serving customers and generating referrals. Good web design is as important alongside good content. A good design will help attract people to your website and good content will then keep them occupied. But is that all you need?
Website speed is an important factor for the usability of a website, as well as the above-mentioned criteria. But it is one factor that is often overlooked by many. A slow website will deter users and force them to use other sites instead. This is primarily why website speed is one of Google’s key search algorithm factors.
The loading speed of a website alongside the design, aesthetics and content will work together to develop successful results. They are equally important to obtain a good position in search results.
Why is website speed so important?
In the current age of technology, users don’t have the patience to wait for websites with poor load speeds or inadequate performance to load up.
The majority of web users will expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If it hasn’t loaded up within 3 seconds, those users tend to abandon the site (although this can sometimes depend on how important your site is to them). This can be especially disastrous if you sell products or services on your website as shoppers who are dissatisfied with an online store’s experience and loading time will take their business elsewhere.
This means you are not only losing your current visitors and decreasing conversion rates, but you run the risk of your site losing traffic from those customers who may have referred your website to others.
But how important is it?
Whilst website speed is one important factor that you should always consider when building and managing your website, it isn’t always the most important. Website design can have a much bigger impact on user experience. It will help keep users engaged and therefore on the site longer.
Simple things such as the aesthetics, graphics, typography, and content can keep users interested but the practical aspects of design like site structure, navigation, accessibility, etc. are also extremely important. Your website needs to ensure that it provides a good user experience because people expect website pages to follow logic, be in a specific order and contain useful internal and external website links.
When Google bots crawl and index websites, they examine the website’s structure, design, URL, internal and external linking, etc., before they rank the pages. If your site design is clumsy and outdated, the search engine will rank it low on SERPs.
A slow loading website can cause visitors to lose interest in your website or blog, jump back to the search results, and then click-through to your competitor’s links. Making sure that your website loads quickly is crucial for helping potential visitors interact with your website while helping you grow your visibility in the search engines. But it’s not the most important aspect that you should consider when building your website. No one is going to care about how fast your website is if they can’t find the content they want on your site or if your site doesn’t have good enough content for them to look at.
How important is your website speed for you? And what steps have you taken to improve your website speed? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
And as ever, if you have any questions or issues with your website, business or brand, leave your thoughts in the comments below or send us an email.