When it comes to site load times, you really want to be the hare not the tortoise.
Page loads essentially speed at which your website will load in a visitors browser. Having pages that load quickly is important from a usability point of view.
From a marketing perspective. you want the experience of coming to your website to be quick and easy for your visitors. If you are a store, you want them to buy.
People on the internet really expect immediacy – they are really impatient.
They get frustrated when pages are slow to load – so much so that they just hit their back arrows and just exit right out. And they head off somewhere else – and that might be to your competitors if you’re selling something online.
While a lot of people are on broadband, and that does improve things, there is still a portion of the Internet population still using dialup to connect through.
If you want to be accessible to people using dial up you really have to pay attention to your page load and make sure your page is quick to load. And by quick I mean a few seconds – the fewer the better.
The kind of things that affect page load are pictures, graphics and video. Also some scripts and the number of objects each page contains.
And where does a slow page load leave your search engine optimization efforts? At the moment, slow page loads affect your customer experience but don’t affect your Google ranking (unless they are really slow) – but Google has signaled that this might change in the future (see the video below).
How Do You Check Your Page Or Site Load Times?
Try this free tool at websiteoptimization.com Just enter your URL and submit it. You’ll be directed to some CAPTCHA code to complete and then you’ll need to wait for your report. Scroll to the bottom and the report will provide you with areas for improvement (plus give you a pat on the back for things you’re doing well).
Like SEO? Check out other SEO posts.
