4 Reasons Why You Should Boost Your Page Speed

We’ve recently made big strides in making our tools even lighter and faster, to do our part towards helping your site perform as smoothly as it can.

So outside of our tools, why should you care if your page speed isn’t up to snuff?

When writing about the importance of page speed, it’s hard to know exactly where to start. How quickly your page loads affects literally every aspect of your website, from your visitor’s experience to the accuracy of your analytics. One thing is for certain, if you care about how your website performs for any metric, page speed will always be on your short-list of optimizations.

Here are 4 big reasons why reasons you should care how quickly your page loads.

1. All bounce means no bite

   Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. If your page takes ages to load, your audience will get impatient and bounce. All of your hard work, no matter how amazing, will go to waste if no one sticks around long enough to see it. Kissmetrics has done extensive analysis on how load times affect visitor behavior, and note that just a 1 second delay in load times can drop conversion by 7%. Now imagine that 7% multiplied by every step in your conversion funnel. Small time frames can mean big losses when everything is taken into consideration.

2. Mobile matters more than ever

   In 2016, we saw a growth in mobile internet traffic top reach 56% of all traffic. That means it’s more likely your audience is visiting your page on their phones or tablet, with smaller screen sizes and slower download rates than those visiting via desktop.What happens when you’re using a slower device to download the same amount? It takes longer, sometimes much longer.

3. SEO competition is increasing

   Search engines are continually evolving their algorithms to account for competition and changes in the online landscape. Google recently announced that page speed on mobile will be a contributing factor to SEO rankings.That’s not all, though. Even on desktop, page speed plays a part in your ranking. How much of a role? No one is quite sure, but trends have indicated that page speed matters most when going after competitive terms and is unlikely to derail or harm the average campaign. That means the more competitive your SEO strategy is, the more likely it is that you need to consider your load times.

4. You can’t track what you can’t see

   Finally, what if your audience was abandoning your site in droves, but you never even knew it? How do you fix a problem if you don’t even know one exists? Plugins can bring tons of functionality to your site, but not all are as streamlined as your AddThis tools. Poor or outdated plugins can dramatically slow down your site, and give you warped analytics (by firing too late to record a visitor before they bounce).Be sure to keep tabs on how many plugins you have running on your site, and make sure they provide a value that is equal to any impact on your performance. We’re confident in the performance of our tools, but we’re going to keep working on making them better on our side.

If you stay on top of your website’s performance, you’re not only doing a service in the moment but also helping maintain all of the systems you’ve set up down-funnel.