Development How Website Speed Impacts Your Marketing KPIs and SEO Rankings Mohamed Hamad Development 9 mins read Jul 22, 2024 How Website Speed Impacts Your Marketing KPIs and SEO Rankings - Mohamed Hamad When it comes to computing or the internet, we are addicted to speed. A sluggish phone, a non-responsive app when tapping buttons, or a slow downloading website just kills any excitement about what’s to come next. And we are especially unforgiving on the web. If a website takes too long to load, we just give up. We expect websites to load in under 3 seconds, regardless of how large or complex they are. Even when we know that our tiny phones are sending messages to space and back, we’re just not happy with the speed of light! Why Does Website Speed Matter? People are impatient. When we perceive something taking too long, we assume it’s not working or it’s of low quality. Research shows that every second counts, and even a one-second delay can drastically increase bounce rates. When we get what we want quickly, we are happy customers. Google uses website speed as a critical ranking factor, rewarding fast-loading pages with higher rankings in search results. Since mobile web usage overtook desktops just under a decade ago with the mainstream adoption of smartphones and 4G, mobile speed is an even bigger factor. Google’s mobile-first indexing prioritizes mobile speed, penalizing websites with slow mobile load times and dropping their rankings in mobile search. Source: Google Fast websites also convert better, reducing friction in the user’s buyer journey, which can significantly increase sales and revenue for transactional websites. Small improvements in site speed can make a substantial difference in performance and profitability. Nearly 70% of users say that an online retailer’s site speed has an impact on how willing they are to buy from that retailer Unbounce, 2023 What Affects Website Speed Modern websites are more complex than ever, with sophisticated app-like features, high-quality photos and videos, and integrations with third-party systems to create a feature-rich experience. Let’s not forget all the advertising and tracking that marketers love to use to get all that sweet user behavior data for targeting. While we keep improving the infrastructure around coding, hosting, and delivering websites, some key fundamentals can slow down a website. The average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile Tooltester, 2024 File Sizes The larger the files are on a website, the longer they take to download. Unfortunately for us, the visual media that makes the web so immersive is the heaviest. Images, videos, and PDFs can slow down a website significantly if not optimized. Optimizing file sizes by compressing images and using appropriate formats can significantly improve load times. Number of HTTP Requests Each element on a webpage, whether displayed or behind the scenes, is an extra item your browser has to request from the server and download. Your browser sends an HTTP request for the item, waits for it to download (depending on its file size), and then has to work to interpret and display it. This takes time, and the more assets, the longer a website takes to load. These assets include images, JavaScript, CSS stylesheets, text, and more. Techniques like combining assets into one larger asset, or browser caching so that a browser doesn’t always need to redownload items from the server, can help. Server Response Time The speed at which the hosting server can process requests and send information is very important. Websites are generally hosted on servers that serve many websites. Depending on the hosting platform and the plan, the performance of the server will impact the speed at which it is capable of responding and processing a website. If a website is hosted with another resource-hungry and complex website, it might slow down the performance of other sites. Finding a quality and performant hosting platform is important. Code Quality Poorly written and complex code can take longer for a server and a browser to parse and interpret. Complicated HTML structures and badly formatted CSS can increase file sizes and parsing time. Unoptimized and poorly written JavaScript can slow down a browser, making a website very slow on your device, especially mobile phones with limited computing power compared to a laptop, which can make the user experience feel very sluggish. Browser Rendering Different browsers have varying capabilities for rendering modern web technologies. Ensuring cross-browser compatibility and following web standards can optimize rendering performance. Network Latency The physical distance between the user and server affects latency and website load times. Using a content delivery network (CDN) that caches and serves content from servers closest to the user can reduce latency. How to Improve Website Speed Optimizing your website for speed and SEO go hand-in-hand, and while some things are technical, a lot of it comes down to implementing best practices and habits. 43% of small businesses plan to improve their website performance and page speed PR Newswire, 2021 Optimize Images & Videos The easiest thing you can do to improve the overall speed of your website is to compress and optimize multimedia assets. Image compression tools like TinyPNG.com have websites you can use for free, a WordPress plugin you can install, and an API to integrate into your custom code websites. If you are making your videos yourself, you can export them using web-optimized compression like MP4. If you are downloading videos from stock media sources, you can use tools like HandBrake, a cross-platform and open-source tool for converting and compressing video. Optimizing Your Website Code Optimizing your code will need either development know-how or collaboration with a developer to help implement best practices. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, there are plugins that can help optimize your site. WordPress optimization plugins range from the very complex and granular like W3Total Cache, to the mid-level Asset Cleanup Pro, to the super turn-key and easy-to-setup WPRocket. These plugins will help you: Minify code: Removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, and code formatting from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, reducing their file sizes without affecting functionality. Optimized CSS & JS Delivery: Render-blocking scripts and CSS will delay page rendering until everything is loaded. These plugins will help prioritize critical assets to get your website ready for your users, with secondary assets loading asynchronously in the background to speed things up. Reduce HTTP Requests: Combining JavaScript and CSS files to make fewer server requests will reduce the number of round-trips your browser has to make to pull assets from the server. Enable Caching: When a page is visited, the code is interpreted on the server and sent to your browser. By enabling caching on the server, your website will save that interpreted output, and instead of re-running it again, it will send it to the next visitor. This server caching can reduce the processing load of the website on the server, speeding up the experience for each subsequent visitor. Leverage Browser Caching: Telling your browser what to cache and for how long (Cache-Control and ETag) will help it know what files to save temporarily on your device. This reduces server requests on repeat visits, significantly improving load speeds. Your browser can store static files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript locally to save resources. Third Wunder recommends WPRocket as their WordPress optimization plugin of choice. Optimize Your Hosting A good hosting platform is essential these days. Not only does it save you time configuring and operating it, it saves you money with reliability and security. If you run a WordPress website, good dedicated hosting platforms will include a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is a distributed network of servers that caches and delivers website content based on the user’s geographic location, reducing latency. Good WordPress hosting platforms will also have performance options and very good response times to make sure your website is fast and responsive. We also wrote a more detailed article on how to choose a dedicated WordPress hosting platform. Final Thoughts 81% of marketers know speed influences their conversions, but they’re not making it a priority Unbounce, 2023 Website speed is a critical factor in user experience, SEO, and conversion rates, and it is a work in progress that needs continuous attention. With strategic implementation and good content creation habits, it doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds. It’s surprising that most marketers overlook this increasingly important factor that affects digital marketing KPIs. Addressing the elements that affect site speed and implementing optimization techniques can lead to significant improvements in website performance. For businesses aiming to enhance their digital presence, investing in website speed optimization is a strategic move that can yield substantial benefits. 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