How Site Speed Affects User Behaviour?

How Site Speed Affects User Behaviour
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If you’ve ever been on a site that takes forever to load, you know how annoying it is. Truth be told, when faced with such a situation, you might even head elsewhere. Why would anyone want to waste their time?

Slow Sites Affect User Perception

When an e-commerce site doesn’t load quickly enough, that deters people from spending time on it. Naturally, that leads to less browsing of products and a lack of sales conversions. We are a spoiled generation who crave immediate gratification. Therefore, it’s safe to say that modern customers would rather search for another online store than suffer slow speeds.

Let’s say you’re a restaurant owner who’s worked hard to produce a website displaying your menus and promotions. If your site takes a few seconds longer to load than others, people will naturally turn their attention elsewhere. Who can blame them?

Time is a commodity. Numbers vary according to sources, but most show that 53% of mobile users click away when pages take more than three seconds to load. In this regard, if website monitoring is something you’re unfamiliar with, it’s time to get acquainted.

Google Will Punish Slow Websites

It isn’t just the users that prefer not to wait. Even search engines like Google will give sites a lower ranking if they take more than two seconds to load. Therefore, if you are trying to make your site show up on the first page of search results, you’ll need to do something about it.

A Laggy Website Depicts an Unprofessional Business

There are no two ways around it – consumers will form an opinion of your business according to your site. Aside from having beautiful design and UX, site speed matters. In most cases, a company’s site is the first thing a future customer encounters. To prevent any losses, implement a website monitoring solution. The benefits are undeniable.

What is website load time?

The loading time of a website – or web page – is how long it takes for that website to load and appear on the screen fully. Text, images, videos, and other content are included in this category. The loading speed of a web page is simply the speed at which all the content appears on the page.

The amount of time it takes for a page to load can depend on a lot of factors. Some examples are the type of page, the user behavior, file sizes, the website server, inefficient code, hotlinking, as well as the number of plugins and widgets it has.

Nearly 70% of consumers told Unbounce in a survey that they are less likely to buy from an online retailer if its page speed is slow. In addition, half of the respondents said they would sacrifice animation and video for faster loading times.

Moreover, mobile loading speeds are extremely important for your website. The importance of your website’s mobile loading speed has even increased with Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing, according to Blue Frog’s Jillian Streit.

It’s unfortunate that most mobile pages load more slowly than their desktop counterparts, and mobile users are used to pages loading much faster. If users are waiting too long for your site to load, you’ll lose out on a lot of potential customers.”

How long does it take for a page to load on average?

Approximately 15.3 seconds were reported to be the average load time for mobile web pages according to Google. In the same report, it was mentioned that the majority of mobile websites have too many elements on their pages. In spite of the fact that most web traffic occurs on 4G rather than 3G, this problem persists.

What is a good page load time?

What Is A Good Page Load Time

A study by Portent found that page load times between 0 and 4 seconds are most effective for conversion rates, with the first five seconds having the most impact.

Ideally, ecommerce conversion rates should be between 0 and 2 seconds for pages loading. 4.42% of website conversion rates are lost for every second it takes to load, according to the study.

You’ve probably heard a saying that states “patience is a virtue,” which means being patient without getting discouraged is a good quality. When we encounter slow page load times, however, that “virtue” goes out the window.

Your visitors will be happier if your website loads quickly. Therefore, optimizing your website’s load time can lead to improved user experience (UX), conversion rates, and ultimately, increased sales.

It may seem unbelievable to you that slashing a few milliseconds from your website’s loading time can have such a significant impact on customer experience.

Your audience can easily lose interest in your website if it takes too long for it to load.

Here’s how to make your website’s pages load faster

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to increase your website’s loading speed. Taking stock of your website’s performance is the first step. Get a breakdown of what needs attention using Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom.

  1. Images and text should be compressed.

Unnecessary images and video files are the main causes of site slowdowns. The sizing and scaling of your images can be reduced or converted, as well as removing any video content that isn’t essential to your site’s content. A lazy loading method can also be implemented, which loads images as a user scrolls down a page.

  1. Optimize for mobile.

You should make your site mobile-friendly if you want it to be successful. Mobile browsers are now the most popular way for consumers to access the internet, not desktop computers.

  1. Providers should be checked.

Mobile optimization and image compression are meaningless without a good server. Be sure to shop around for a good web host that provides solid customer support.

  1. Caching.

Using caching, users can gain access to information faster by storing information on their devices. Returning users will especially benefit from this.

  1. Reduce Javascript and CSS

As the top code is loaded first, the user will see the top of the website as normal as the browser loads the code near the footer while the top code is still being loaded. By deferring code from the top to the footer, the user’s initial load time for the website will be reduced.

Thank you for reading!