How website speed affects users and SEO

We all know that the loading speed of a website influences its use, especially when you are the one in front of the screen waiting for more than 20 seconds.

Controlling your website's loading speed will allow you to lower your bounce rate, as users may leave before the site finishes loading. It's important to remember that users increasingly expect faster page load times.

Why does it affect SEO?

This is due to several factors that are improved by having a good loading speed.

• Decreases the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing a page. Google doesn't like this at all, as it interprets a high bounce rate as a sign that your site lacks relevant content for users, thus lowering its ranking.

• Improves indexing.

Search engine crawlers have a limited time to visit each website and index all the URLs they find, but if a website's loading speed is slow, the crawler won't crawl all the site's URLs due to lack of time, causing not all the URLs on that site to be indexed. This is especially noticeable on larger websites that generate a lot of content daily.

If the opposite happens and the website loads quickly, the spiders will be able to index all those URLs.

This is not the only benefit of having a fast-loading website; there are more:

• Improves the user experience.

With a fast website, the user has a positive feeling because the information they need is displayed instantly, but if the speed is slow, the user will have a bad experience and leave the site.

• Improve the conversion rate.

If a website takes too long to load, users lose interest in buying the products or services it offers. This has been confirmed by studies conducted by companies like Amazon, which states that 40% returns from e-commerce shoppers abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Amazon estimates that a one-second delay in page load time could cost up to $1.6 million in annual sales.

 

So, how long should a website take to load?

There's no single answer to this question, but it's said that most visitors who encounter a 40% error will close a website if it takes more than 2 seconds to load. Others will wait up to 3 seconds, and if that doesn't happen, they'll go to another site.

If you are thinking of creating a website for your business, whether corporate or online store, Get in touch with us And the best professionals in the sector, with extensive experience, will help you create the best website for your company.