Megan Totka Every Second Matters: Page Speed Should Be Your Next Focus 32 Wow-Score The Wow-Score shows how engaging a blog post is. It is calculated based on the correlation between users’ active reading time, their scrolling speed and the article’s length. Learn more Every Second Matters: Page Speed Should Be Your Next Focus Megan Totka
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Websites with slow load times are frustrating for users, and hurt website rankings, too. There are various reasons websites may load slowly, from bad optimization to low quality web hosting. The problem with websites that load too slowly is that people don’t want to take the time to wait for the site to load, and if they have to wait even a few seconds they are likely to abandon the website and not return.
This is the reason why the speed of your website has an effect on your sales. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, almost half of all web users want to see a site load in 2 seconds or less – and even tend to leave the site if it doesn’t load in three seconds. In addition, 44 percent of people say they would tell a friend if they had a poor online shopping experience.
Slow load time causes your business to lose conversions from people currently on your website who may have made a purchase — and the loss extends to their friends, too, as users share the poor experience they had on your website. Lots of potential sales go down the drain because of a few seconds.
Speed Equals More Customers
Speed is extremely important to ensure a positive user experience. Websites with faster page load speeds provide a positive user experience and that tends to lead to an increase in conversions. If a website offers content, users can navigate to various pages of your website with ease if web pages load quickly. If your business sells products or services, it is easier for visitors to see what you offer and decide to make a purchase if they don’t have to wait for web pages to load.
Speed Means Higher Page Rank
Google uses various factors to determine how to rank search engine results, and one of the biggest factors is the page load time. Slow loading web pages negatively impact search ranking and the web pages are penalized because they slow down the entire Internet.
Page speed matters to Google because the chances are better that users will remain on your website if they have a positive experience. When visitors have a good experience, it often leads to better conversions.
Google picks up on that and pushes the websites with slow page load time down on search engine rankings. The ones that load quickly are deemed relevant and stay at the top of the rankings. Remember this and make it a point to focus on all of the ways to generate more leads for your business with SEO – SEO is a big deal to your business and its success.
VPS Hosting for Faster Web Experiences
The negative impact a slow page load time has on business revenue means more businesses are turning to VPS, or hosting virtual private services, due to its variety of benefits. These virtualization technologies increase performance and functionality – hosting a website or application on a VPS makes sense for many organizations. However, when you are trying to compare the pros and cons of shared hosting versus VPS hosting, there is a lot to consider.
Hosting companies are over-selling servers making thousands of customers share the same web server. This means the reliability of their services will diminish sooner or later.
With shared hosting, each site actually competes for the server’s memory resource, so it becomes very thin and can take almost 30 seconds to load.
VPS hosting means your website is in a virtual machine with dedicated memory, storage, and processing resources across a network of servers. The dedicated allocation of server resources means you know your site will load faster. Businesses realize the risk this poses to a website – most don’t want to risk the server crashing and the website and sales suffering. VPS offers users more stability and reliability for web hosting needs than shared web hosting.
Other good news is that VPS is now a cost-effective solution for small websites. VPS hosting solutions are less expensive than they were just a couple of years ago and the advances in virtualization technologies mean the prices are likely to continue to decrease. VPS hosting is now a feasible option for websites of all sizes – even businesses and websites that are brand new.
Final Thoughts
Page load speed is often overlooked, yet is one of the most significant factors of conversion optimization and SEO. Businesses may be doing all of the right things, but if their website is slow to load, sales are missed and the site’s rankings are negatively impacted. Make your page load speed a top priority – every second matters when it comes to giving your customer the best experience possible.
What tools do you use to check your page loading speed? Do you use VPS hosting? Share below and tell us why or why not!
