It’s been many years that we have considered how fast a page loads as one of the on-site optimization criterium used by Google spiders. The faster a page loads, the better rank it will have on Google.
This was proven a day ago when Google announced that it is going to add “Site Speed” to Google Analytics results. Site Speed will measure and report how fast each of your Web pages will load (on average) when someone visits your site.
But why load-time speed is so important?
We know the sites that are very pretty and have sophisticated designs, such as FLASH sites, or sites that are image or video heavy load slower. On the other hand, sites that only have text and very minimal navigation (except through text-links) load the fastest – but text-only sites are boring.
With the Internet speed growing in average house-holds, you’d think sites that are more beautiful should get more credit by Google, but not so fast. It is true that we now have faster Internet speed around the world compared to a few years ago, however, as Internet users, our patience for loading pages has also diminished. We leave a page quickly if it doesn’t load within a few of seconds. Or if we really want the page, we are frustrated to wait.
According to Pear Analytics, In 2007 Amazon conducted a test to see how the speed of your page loading affects losing traffic. The results were astonishing. For every second that your site loads slower, you lose roughly 1% of your site’s traffic. This means if you have a FLASH site and it takes 20 seconds to load, you lose 20% of your site’s visitors before they even see your site. In sales numbers, losing 20% of your potential customers is HUGE.
So, our recommendation to you is to make your site load as fast as possible to increase your page-views, traffic and consequently sales.
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