5 reasons why Page Speed is important

The website page speed is one of the less known elements when talking about the website and SEO, and most people think that developers should make the website fast only because Google told the page speed should be no more than 3 seconds.

Partially that’s true, but there are more reasons to take good care of your website page speed, and I would list them here.

1. Page speed is a ranking factor

This is one of the main reasons why people are talking about page speed and doing efforts to improve page speed. Indeed, Page Speed is a ranking factor in all Search Engines today and they recommend making your web page open in the shortest possible time, ideally in less than 3 seconds.

This is not so easy to achieve this goal, especially if you are using the Frameworks and complex CMS systems in building your website, but also it is not impossible. Of course, it is worth it because your website would likely be ranked better. On the other side, only the page speed is not a guaranty of better ranking of your website and separate pages and keywords but may help it, if joined by all other efforts, described in part in my previous posts about the Technical SEO and Content SEO, and as they would be described in the future posts.

2. You have 3 seconds for a first impression

Another reason to develop and optimize the website for speed is a fact that you have only 3 seconds to leave the first impression on your visitors.

In the era of digital technologies and instant information, it is not likely that someone would wait for 10 or 15, even 20 seconds for your website to open. Even worst, in case if your website is opening in 30 or 50 seconds, which is often the case with non-optimized websites.

Instead of waiting for a half minute to see what is on your website, your visitors would bounce back to the search engine and go to your competitors who have better page speed. In this battle – you are losing if your page speed exceeds three, or a maximum of 5 seconds.

A very nice example here is the website with poor page speed where the speed index is 5.5 seconds and the time for the page to become interactive is 7.8 seconds, which is still far away from the recommended 3 seconds.

Not only this website would need to make much harder efforts to rank high and achieve TOP positions, but also, because of the page speed, this website is losing visitors, which are very hard to achieve in a very competitive niche. This way the website is losing money directly because of the poor page speed.

This figure shows that 76.3% of users are staying on the website less than 30 seconds, which means they didn’t wait long enough for the page to open completely and load to be responsive and ready to be used, and the website (and Company behind it) have lost the chance to leave the positive first impression on their visitors.

The average time to find the page we are interested in on a website and read the content is approximately five to ten minutes, which means that, in this case, the Company is losing more than 86% of their visitors in the first step, even before people had a chance to read what the Company wants to tell them with their website.

3. Respect your visitors time

The time is money, equally for you and your clients and the website visitors.

If you are into serious business with your website, offering products or services to other business people, be sure they value their time too, same as you value it, and they would not spend it useless.

Let’s say it this way. If you have 100.000 visitors to your website every month, and your website is opening in 10 seconds, instead of 3 seconds, you would be uselessly spending 70.000 seconds from your visitor’s precious time. In case if your visitors are willing to wait that long and are opening just 3 pages on your website, they will be wasting 210.000 seconds of their time waiting for your page to load completely, which is 58.3 hours a month. It's 7.3 working days (8 hours working day), or two full days per month.

I want to ask you here: Would you risk to the waste that much time when you are browsing other websites and looking for the valuable information you need?

4. Server disc space is expensive

The space on the server is expensive and you would be paying additional money for every single bite of data you store on the server.

If you have non-optimized images on the server, JS, and CSS, they would probably use a lot of space on the server.

If you are hosting your website on shared hosting, you will be limited with space and have to utilize it wisely.

If you are owning a dedicated server or using the VPS, or Cloud, you may have more space, but those types of hosting cost much more money.

Also, keep in mind that, when the user is opening your website, he has to download to his computer or mobile phone the whole page, with all scripts, styles, images, and everything. The Search engine recommendation is to keep page size up to 1 Mb, but the practice shows that all of the websites built on popular CMS platforms are up to five-time heavier than a recommendation.

This means that users have to download at least five times more data than they need to show and read your page. Even worst, if your images are not well optimized, your clients would be spending much more time and their mobile or Internet data do read your pages, which may be costly for them, especially if they don’t have a permanent Internet connection, of their connection is slow.

5. You may face the server limits

Processor power

Every computer in this world, including the web servers, has known limitations, like hard disk space, processor speed, memory, data transfer limits, and so on.

If your developers build a website solution for you, not thinking about the server utilization, soon you may run into serious problems, and those problems would come at the time when you need them less than anything else.

If there is a big number of java scripts and they are big in size, your server would spend much more processor power to read and translate your scripts than in serving the needs of your visitors, which would be resulting in losing performance of your server and as consequence – losing the money because of high “jump rate” – people who would be leaving your website even before they see the page on your website.

Disk space

Building a huge website which is in its initial stage, even empty, and heavy tens or hundreds of megabytes, soon you may run into trouble with disk space, especially if the images are not properly scaled and optimized, you may be facing not only disk space shortage but also losing the clients and SERP positions because of the poor page speed.

Concurrent connections

Another important moment to consider when we are talking about your server limits is concurrent connections. This means, how many visitors your website can accept and serve in one second.

The bottleneck here is not how your front-end website works, but is more about how much traffic and load your server can handle at the same time.

Here is the formula to calculate this:

(Number of CPU cores / Average Page Response Time in seconds) * 60 * User Click Frequency in seconds = Maximum simultaneous users

I general, the small shared hosting can handle 10-15 concurrent connections in one second, while the good VPS hosting can handle up to 170 or 200 concurrent connections.

What does affect your website page response time?

1.     Website complexity - Complexity is the number one factor that impacts response time. Today’s modern websites are in effect highly componentized applications built from an ever-growing mix of third-party services, cloud-based computing, and self-hosted infrastructure. Too often, organizations get wrapped up in adding so much functionality and too many third-party plugins which they don’t really need, and that causes performance to suffers.

2.     Interdependencies - The top factor impacting website response time is application/infrastructure/endpoint interdependencies. Shifting dynamics across these interdependencies can cause latencies, outages, security breaches, and wreak havoc on end-user experience.

3.     Latency - The top factor that impacts website response time is latency. The Time to first byte (TTFB) is a speed metric that drives satisfactory user experience and search rankings. TTFB is the time it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of the response from a web server.

4.     DEMAND PEAKS - Scaling is a critical factor that impacts website response time. Think about the Black Friday or Cyber Monday. These may be extreme examples but they illustrate a very good point. Infrastructure must be to be scaled to handle peak rates rather than average rates. Peaks in demand may only last for a short time, sometimes only milliseconds but they have a much longer-lasting effect, impacting not only the web server and supporting systems but more importantly user experience.

5.     WEB PAGE SIZE - In my experience, the single most consistent factor that contributes to slower load times is the page size. A fatter page is a slower page. In a study of 60 popular sites that used responsive design, only 20% rendered acceptably quickly - and these were only sites that were less than 1 MB in size. According to the HTTP Archive, the average web page today is more than 2 MB in size.

6.     RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN - Google gives higher priority to mobile-friendly websites. Hence, the new race is to build websites that use responsive web design techniques. This could create performance problems if resources, such as images, are not properly managed.

7.     JAVASCRIPT – Company Radware has been studying the various factors that impact website response time for years. Aside from a steady increase in the volume of data required for each page, one of the largest impacts that we are seeing comes from the increasing dependency on JavaScript. When these scripts block the execution or download slowly the overall site performance is directly impacted.

8.     WEB CONTENT AND CODE - The top factor that affects website response time is full page load time. This is a “Time to Interactive” metric in the Google Page Speed tool. Nothing harms the user experience more than slow loading times, especially when multimedia, Flash, or other graphics are involved. As more and more code resides on the browser side, one of the top factors impacting website response time is un-optimized browser-side content like a download of large images, no caching, too many redirects, or DNS lookups. Using the special tools, you can see exactly how much time was spent on resolving DNS lookups, how much time was spent on downloading content, time spent in load event scripts, and so forth.

Not matter how beautiful you paint your car, or what sound system you put into it, or which seats you install inside it if the car engine is poorly designed and made the car would never serve you as you really need and deserve.

Be mindful of your website, because it's your business card to the world, and your significant, if not the main revenue source. Your website is your money!

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If you have any questions about the Web Site Page Speed, feel free to write me a message. I would be glad to help you.

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