How Site Speed Impacts Traffic on Your Website

Traditionally, web performance has been a game for the techies. Site content, landing page optimization, search engine optimization (SEO) - all of these live in the marketer’s domain. But what is becoming clearer with time is that the two worlds can no longer exist separately.

Site speed has a direct, measurable impact on conversion rate, revenue, and user engagement.

Instead of Time to First Byte, we are now talking about user engagement, the time they spend on site, and conversion rates. All these metrics are heavily impacted by the SPEED of your site, both perceived speed and real speed.

Why Faster Websites Are More Important Now Than Ever

A fast and well-performing site is crucial to improving your metrics across the board. A site that loads quickly will lead to more visits, more returning visitors, more content viewed and read, and ultimately more conversions and more dollars for your business.

As a business owner, you want more traffic on your website. But with a slow, un-engaging site, it doesn’t matter how many visitors you have. They won’t stay on the site, never return and definitely not buy anything from your pages.

For a website that takes more than three seconds to have visible and readable content, 40% of visitors will abandon the website and over 80% are not likely to return. On smartphones, over 70% of viewers will abandon the site if it takes longer than five seconds to have visible and readable content.

Every additional second added on to your load time results in a 7% loss in conversions.

Shaving two seconds off of Mozilla’s landing pages resulted in a 15.4% increase in conversions, which meant 60 million more downloads per year. That’s just a two-second difference, so any impact you can make has the potential to improve your business. Keeping a user engaged on your site has a direct impact on conversion rate and revenue, amongst other marketing metrics.

A one-second delay in response time can result in 11% fewer page views and a 16% loss in customer satisfaction. Plus, 40% of online shoppers feel that the most influential factor for them to revisit a site is whether the website will load quickly.

Google's Core Web Vitals

Aside from all the reasons outlined above, we must also pay special attention to the recent hot topic from Google themselves - the Core Web Vitals.

Essentially, these are measurement factors that determine how great a website's overall user experience is. Specifically, these are used to give webpages scores in terms of page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

The Core Web Vitals are mainly categorized into three factors:

• Large Contentful Paint
• First Input Delay
• Cumulative Layout Shift.

Large Contentful Paint measures a website's overall loading speed. Technically, it determines how quickly all the pixels and major elements on a page fully load or become visible to the user. The faster the better for users and for search engine optimization purposes.

First Input Delay is a measurement factor that looks at how soon a browser reacts to an activity triggered by the user. Once again, the quicker the better. As for Cumulative Layout Shift, this determines how stable a page is when loading. If you've noticed, sometimes a website can twitch or load in a wonky manner, which then negatively affects user experience. This must be remedied and stability must be pursued.

At the core of it, Google is using these Core Web Vitals measurements to determine web performance and overall user experience. They assign certain scores and those that are considered Good will have higher chances of appearing on the top search results. Those considered Needs Improvement or Poor will most likely perform poorly on the search results as well.

Of course, other SEO and online marketing factors should still be considered when building a website and the Core Web Vitals are not the end-all-be-all of website performance metrics. Still, they have their own importance and must not be ignored either.

Overall, these metrics give more weight to the importance of building faster websites.

Given All These, Where Do I Start?

Run a simple test on your current website - go to https://testmysite.io and type in your website address (any website address actually) and see for yourselves. You should have a score of 85 or higher to be good on speed and security.

If you want to have a more complete picture of where your website is at and what WebriQ goes Mad can do for you - check out our services or get in touch with us for a more thorough discussion!

Improving Your Website’s Speed

What do we do to get your website SPEED and PERFORMANCE up to the highest levels possible?

• We use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) instead of a server - when traffic volume is high, your web server can easily get so bogged down processing asset requests. This can lead to the server having trouble dealing with the more important functions, such as presenting the page views and processing transactions. A CDN offloads server requests from your infrastructure to dedicated, sometimes global servers in multiple data centers. That means your site won’t crash or slow down with heavy traffic. This is normally considered the first step towards better web performance because it effectively takes care of the back end metrics and expands your infrastructure capabilities.
• We use files instead of a database - beyond being highly insecure and hackable, a database is slow to react to queries. The more people are visiting your website, the more queries will go to the database, the slower it will react to those queries. A file-based website is pre-built, so to speak, and the only thing a browser needs to do is render files and assets without going through a multitude of server scripts to build your website. It is fast and it is secure.
• We avoid using scripts; we prefer Application Program Interfaces (API) - Social media widgets, trackers, and other gadgets on your site are hosted in locations far and wide and on servers you have no control over. When those widgets have performance issues, their problems spill onto your site and drag down your performance. Typically, third-party assets are <script> tags, and the browser will put a hold on downloading all other assets until this tag has been downloaded and executed, meaning one bad asset can prevent the rest of the page from downloading for sometimes whole seconds. By forcing third-party assets to load asynchronously, you’ll prevent the possibility of your site’s download process being arrested by one problematic widget.
• Asset Optimization - this is a bit more technical but, in essence, this exercise compresses images, concatenates CSS and Javascript files to reduce requests, reduces file size through minifying the size of the files and rewrites URL links into pretty URLs.
• Eliminating errors and missing assets - more than speed, fixing errors or missing assets is an easy way to improve the performance of your site. If there is any error or missing asset on your site, it is most likely that your visitor will abandon your site and never return.
• Technology Stack - Last, but not least, we use this. It helps your web pages speed past the competition.

Key Takeaways:

• WebriQ Goes Mad builds the fastest possible websites. Instead of waiting to generate pages when requested, we pre-build pages and lift them into a global cloud of servers — ready to be delivered instantly to your users wherever they are.
• No complicated deploys with databases and servers and their expensive, time-consuming setup costs, maintenance, and scaling fears. WebriQ Goes Mad builds your site as “static” files, which can be deployed easily on dozens of services.
• Once your website is loaded, we prefetch resources for other pages so clicking around the site feels incredibly fast.

Do you want to learn more about the WebriQ Goes Mad websites that are blazing fast?

Schedule a call with Alex Belding, our Growth Officer - Schedule a quick 15 minute call.