Page Speed
Page speed or site speed indicates the load time of a webpage. The basic principle is the faster the better, because site speed affects the Conversion rate and thus sales.
The most common load time brakes
Small websites often suffer from problems such as huge images, fragmented JavaScript and inactivated compression or slow databases. However, the sheer amount of different files to be loaded can also cause long load times. Each file retrieval requires a DNS query and that takes time.
Google Page Speed
Google supports webmasters with the page speed tools in the Google Search Console. Page Speed Services allow webmasters to provide their page in Google CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Relationship between site speed and conversion rate
The conversion rate is an important statistic for e-commerce that can be affected by site speed. The longer the load time of a page, the more likely customers will abort and buy from another supplier. One of four customers will abort loading of a page if it takes longer than ten seconds.
The e-commerce giant Amazon has calculated that a load time of more than 100 milliseconds will reduce sales by approximately 1%. The daily turnover of Amazon.com is approximately 67 million dollars. This represents lost opportunity cost of 670,000 dollars a day, that would add up to $ 244.5 million in a year.
In the area of mobile shopping, bounce rates are even higher. 40% of buyers will abort from trying to buy something when the page does not respond within three seconds. The mobile shopping market is not yet as strong in Germany as in the U.S., where already 79% of users make mobile purchases.
In 2008, the large US price comparison shopping site Shopzilla launched a redesign of its site and placed particular attention on site speed in the design. As a result, the conversion rate and page impressions increased by a double-digit percentage.
Significance for search engines
In its analysis of web pages, Google included site speed as a ranking factor in the past. Websites with a faster load time than their competitors therefore obtained a higher ranking. Google explained this by saying that they want to provide the user with the best possible experience when surfing the web. Site speed as a ranking factor is one of many evaluation factors for the algorithm.
Site speed optimization
Google offers the ability to analyze site speed with its analytics tool. Applicable graphs can be found with the standard reports in the content area.
Load times of pages that include many images as content can be reduced through the use of a Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Moreover, compression of images to thumbnails can help. Many plug-ins, which are used as part of CMS impact site speed as well. WordPress, for example, has comprehensive extensions available that are not always useful. Through intensive use of these extensions site speed could deteriorate.
Web Links
- Google study on site speed
- Site speed explained on SEOmoz.org
- Official Google article about the load times of web pages
- eCommerce Speed Analytics Dashboards