Search Engine Optimization - 19 Mar 2015

Impact of Website Loading Time on SEO Performance

If a company has ever wondered if the speed in which website pages load has any impact on their SEO performance, the answer is definitely yes.

There are several disadvantages to having a slow loading website such as reduction in conversion rates, increased bounce rates, lowered rankings in search engines and loss of customer loyalty. All of these factors significantly hamper a company’s ability to win the battle for sales over their competition.

Surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com produced some eye-opening statistics for online businesses.
Here are some alarming facts pertaining to website loading time and online consumer behavior:

• Almost half of online users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less
• Almost half of online users would abandon a site that didn’t load within 3 seconds
• 79% of online consumers who have trouble with Website performance say they wouldn’t return to the site to buy again
• Approximately 44% of online consumers would tell those they know if they had a poor experience shopping online

In addition to decreased sales, search engine rankings can take a big hit, as Google places great emphasis on rewarding companies that deliver better user experiences. Website loading time and SEO go together hand in hand, according to Google. Fast load times increase the odds that consumers will remain on the website and that makes Google and consumers very happy.

E-commerce businesses will be able to determine whether or not their website pages are lagging by using an online tool such as http://www.webpagetest.org/ to test their website’s load performance.If results show pages are sluggish to load, there are ways to improve the speed.

Some of the changes a company can make to their online site to boost load performance could be resizing images to include fewer pixels, enabling browser caching, compressing large pages, reducing the number of ads on pages and shifting the online site to their own server for hosting. There are useful tools available at no cost that will analyze a website’s performance and will suggest changes that could be made to improve site performance such as https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ .

Website loading time and SEO should not be overlooked as they are two very important contributing factors in the rise and fall of a business’s online success.