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Your Website And Its Performance

Once you’ve designed and created your website, you may think all you need to do is sit back and wait for traffic to come pouring in from search engines. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Putting aside the necessary marketing efforts needed to drive traffic, both organically and otherwise, a huge consideration for every website owner should continually be their site’s performance.

When we talk about website performance, we are referring to its speed and the time it takes for pages to load. A website that under-performs will be viewed negatively by its visitors which will, in turn, negatively impact conversions.

Not only that, but the search engines like Google take website speed very seriously and penalize slow sites by placing them lower down in their search engine pages. Thus, making organic reach even more difficult.

And, it doesn’t stop there. Even if you don’t consider organic traffic to be particularly important because you are planning a paid ad campaign with the likes of Google Adwords, your ads and quality score will be affected by your site’s speed too!

Highlighting The Speed Issue

Recently, the guys over at Top 10 Website Hosting created an infographic dedicated to highlighting the importance of a speedy website. The team included facts and stats of internet users’ opinions on website speed.

Let’s take a look at just some of the things we learned.

Mobile Internet VS Desktop

Is your website optimized for mobiles? It should be! In 2018, it was found that 52.2% of internet traffic came from a mobile device. And, unfortunately for website owners, mobile web pages take longer to load than desktop pages – 87.84% longer to be precise!

Mobile internet users expect their pages to load in 2 seconds or under. Regardless of where this expectation has come from, or how ridiculously high this standard seems to be, failing to meet expectations will do considerable damage to your brand’s reputation.

34.2% of internet users blame a website for slow-loading pages. And, 66% of consumers say they’re opinion of a brand is influenced by their website’s performance. Simply put, a poorly-performing website will leave your visitors with a poor impression of your brand. This is not something that any website should strive for. On the contrary, businesses should be actively working to rectify any speed issues to make their sites as quickly as possible.

Solving The Problem

There are simple actions you can take to boost your website’s performance. Aside from keeping it up-to-date, regularly clearing its cache, and opting for a powerful hosting solution, you can also minimize the amount of added features.

Things like animations may look fun but they slow websites down. 56% of people say they would choose a fast-loading website over animations. Therefore, if something on your website (that’s not strictly necessary) is causing significant speed problems, it makes far more sense to remove that element in favor of higher speeds.

Make speed one of your top priorities for 2020! Your customers will thank you for it!