Why is Pagespeed so important?

Users may get dissatisfied with a slow-loading website, resulting in higher bounce rates and fewer conversions. Furthermore, search engines such as Google consider pagespeed as a ranking element, which means that slow-loading websites may receive worse search engine rankings, resulting in decreased visibility and visitors. As a result, maximizing pagespeed is critical for the success of a website.

Pagespeed is one of the most crucial criteria for a positive user experience, a high conversion rate, and thus increased sales. If your page takes too long to load, your users will be irritated - so much so that, in the worst case scenario, they will continue their search on another website. There is also an excellent argument for search engines to pay attention to pagespeed: Google has used loading time as a ranking factor since 2010.

What is Pagespeed?

The time it takes to display a requested page on a screen (also known as load time) is referred to as pagespeed. Pagespeed is the time it takes from the HTTP request (e.g., clicking on a SERP result) from the browser to the server to the complete and functional display of the called URL.

What factors play into pagespeed?

There are essentially four steps or sections that make up the pagebuilding processes that make up pagespeed:

The time it takes to interact with the content (e.g. click on a button), also called Time To Interact (TTI).
The time it takes to render the page in the browser, that is, to visually display the data from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
The time it takes to download the contents of the HTML page being viewed.
The response time of the server, also called Time To First Byte (TTFB). This is the time span from the request (e.g. the click on a blue link in the search results) until the browser receives the first data from the website’s server.

The user’s Internet connection speed should theoretically be taken into account when calculating pagespeed. After all, it affects how quickly a page can develop as well. Pagespeed and pagespeed optimization, however, deal with elements like image file size and quantity, CSS, JavaScript, and more that are controlled by the specific website in question and its server. The website operator has no control over the reliability of the Internet connection. It is not included as an evaluation criterion because of this.

Why is load time so important?

The turnover, loading speed, and user experience

The amount of time it takes for a page to load greatly influences whether visitors stay and make a purchase or leave and find a solution elsewhere.

A loss of 40% in mobile users can be caused by a load time of just 3 seconds.

Google examined 11 million landing pages that mobile Google AdWords linked to across 213 nations. The information:

In 70% of the pages analyzed, the Above The Fold load time is 5 seconds or longer, and the overall page load time was much longer.
Mobile users make up more than half of all website traffic. Conversion rates for mobile users are also much lower than for desktop users.
The bounce rate rises dramatically as the number of items and loading times increase, and along with it, the likelihood of conversion declines.
Even though 4G networks currently carry the majority of mobile traffic, mobile pages are still laggy and clogged with too many components.

So, how long a visitor must wait for the page to load will primarily impact whether they stay on your website and make a purchase or depart. In other words, your revenue is greatly influenced by the loading time.

The ranking factor of loading time

Search engines automatically take notice of user frustration with sluggish pages. Their goal is to constantly deliver the best response to a search query—both in terms of technology AND content. It follows that it is understandable why ranking factors (for searches made using desktop computers) have included loading time since 2010.

The importance of quick page loading on mobile devices increased with the emergence of smartphones and heavy mobile usage. The desire to wait for the website to load is generally quite low, especially when on the go. Moreover, lengthy data quantities are always linked to sluggish page loading. They devour mobile users’ data usage. Disappointment is inevitable.

Users will experience frustration more quickly in the near years due to rising mobile traffic, powerful end devices, and swift data networks.

Google implemented pagespeed a ranking feature for mobile search in 2018, staying loyal to its purpose.

However, this important factor still does not seem to be properly understood by many agencies and service providers in the field of web development.

The budget for crawling and the loading time

If the load time is too high, large websites with hundreds of thousands of pages may experience issues with their crawl budget. So, fresh or updated content that ought to rank can be added to the search engine index a few days later than it ought to be. They can only rank (better) as a result of a delay and increased traffic.

The cause is that numerous website elements and huge files always result in slow loading times (e.g. images and videos). Your domain has a daily crawl budget of X available to it. Due to their lean programming and low data volume requirements, crawlers are able to crawl and index more pages per day the quicker they can crawl individual pages.

Conclusion

The priority of SEO and internet marketing must be pagespeed.

If you want to generate long-term traffic, conversions and sales with your website, you can’t disregard the loading speed. Particularly online retailers who only receive revenue from their online presence must make it as simple as possible for customers to make a purchase. This involves not discouraging them with protracted website loading times.

To make matters worse, if you can’t satisfy users, your ranks in search engines will keep declining.

As mobile traffic increases, the demand for a fast-loading website will continue to expand in the future. As a result, you should dedicate a portion of your SEO efforts to regularly monitoring and improving your site’s pagespeed.