Website load times have become really critical in deciding the impact that your website will have to the public. Search engines, for example Google and Bing, are using these load times to determine the ranking of the different websites.
The load times are also used to calculate PPC quality scores for your website. So in this article we will discuss website load times – what it means for your website design and ranking.
We will look at just what these load times mean, and some ways of optimizing them. This will guide you towards avoiding lost visitors to your site and also lost income. We are going to look at some numbers and figures that could shock you.
At a recent survey conducted by Google, interesting facts were revealed about the preferences of the user. The Google Vice President, Marrisa Mayer (speaking at a recent web2.0 conference), said that the website load times mattered a lot on the amount of traffic that is received on the website.
The VP claimed that Google conducted a poll to find out whether most web-surfers were willing to get many more results while they searched the net. Most users, during that poll, said that they wanted to have as many as thirty results. This is thrice as much as the usual ten.
So after Google obliged to the consumer requests and put the thirty results per search, imagine what happened? The traffic to these pages dropped by 20%. Then the question is, if the consumers wanted more searches per page, why did they visit these pages less often after their demands for more results were met?
It turns out that these extra results took longer to load than the original ten. The time difference is about half a second. This vividly shows that the number of results did not matter if the user is not willing to sit around and wait for them to load. And this was just a half a second difference.
The load time here proves to be critical to the success of your website. It is therefore very important to make sure that your website loads pretty fast, because most web surfers will not stick around and wait for a site that loads very slowly.
This survey goes a long way to show that a half a second difference will negatively affect your site. You can imagine how much a difference one second could make. You could end up with a docile website that none ever visits.
However, if you make your website load at half the speed it is loading at right now, you could enjoy up to 13% increase in the traffic which translates to more income.
There are several ways that have been designed to make your site load faster. Let us look at the simplest one. That is the tactic of compression. The page is compressed by your host computer before being sent. The user's browser will decompress it and deliver it in the original, bigger, size.
This ensures that the smaller compressed page will be loaded pretty much faster than if it were in the initial size. The two options to use for this are File deflation and GZIP Compression.
The importance of a lower load time is therefore to attract more traffic. Most users will not be patient enough to wait around for your website to load.
Image: arztsamui / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Reads:818Posted: March 29th, 2012 under Gwt - GlobalWorldTech, Web Design, Web Development.
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