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Website owners and marketing professionals are always looking for ways to improve the website. Without a good website optimized for user experience and caters to modern consumer behavior and human psychology, you won’t be able to get the online results you want.
To get the most out of your website, you will need to make sure that everything about your website is optimized. From responsive design to adequately placed call to action buttons, striving for perfection is the name of the game.
One thing that a lot of websites can improve is their page speeds. Nobody likes visiting a website that has a substandard loading time. Improving page speed will not only be beneficial for your website users, but it has also become an important search ranking factor.
What is page speed, and why does it matter?
To put things simply, page speed is a measuring unit for how fast your page manages to loads the contents present on it.
Page speed matters a lot. Suppose your online audience has to wait for longer than the usual time it takes for a website to load (around 5 to 7 seconds max). In that case, they will immediately bounce (meaning that they will back off of your website without visiting another page).
Google and other modern search engines want to provide the best user experience possible to their users. Websites that cannot keep up with the times and focus on delivering value and maintain a positive user experience are generally ranked lower on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
If your website does not have a good design or is significantly lacking in loading speed, it will be harder for you to rank, and you might even face a penalty from search engines.
What is Page Speed Insights?
To make things easier for website owners, developers, and marketers, Google came out with a tool that could be used to rate your site’s page speed.
Page Speed Insights is a tool that you can use to find out how well a URL is doing in page speed. A score out of 100 is given to every URL. Anything above or equal to 90 is good, 50 to 90 could be improved, and anything under 50 is poor and needs to be seriously looked into and fixed.
Back when it was first released, you only got one performance score. But these days, your URL is given two scores; one for desktop and the other for mobile devices.
Optimizing for both is important because more and more people are using mobile devices to use Google and surf the internet generally.
Here is how page speed affects your search rankings:
Slowers sites have higher bounce rates.
Having a high bounce rate is not by any means, a healthy or positive sign for any website. It means that the user who came to your site visited a single web page and left without exploring your website more. One of the easy way to reduce bounce rate is to install a live chat app for websites so that you can engage visitors through chat to reduce their bounce rate.
There can be many reasons for a high bounce rate. Maybe your website has a similar sounding name to a popular site that people frequent quite often. Another reason might be that your online visitor found what they were looking for right on the first page and didn’t need to visit any other page.
But slow page speeds and loading times also play a massive role in increasing the bounce rate because people behave in reciprocal determinism so even if your website is great but one frustrating thing can ruin it all. If your online visitor clicks on your website in the SERP and has to wait for more than what is standard, they will immediately bounce and go to another site that loads in time.
Dwell time is generally low for slow sites.
Dwell time on websites is the time a user spends on a web page. Generally, higher dwell times mean that your online audience is engaged with the content present on your website.
Slower sites put a big dent in user experience. Bad user experience leads to people going to other websites if they have the option to.
Conclusion:
Google page speed insights is a brilliant tool to have if you want to optimize your website for visitors and search engines. Better page speed gives you an improved chance of ranking high on the SERP, which all websites would want.
