How vital are site speeds?

Let’s start with the basics - what is site speed?

Site speed is defined as how quickly can a user see and interact with the content served by your website. Now, in 2020, fast site speed has become a crucial factor in the success of your overall digital marketing strategy and online presence. This is because your website’s speed has a significant impact on your SEO rankings on desktop and mobile, along with Google’s paid ads, impacting quality score and overall user experience and conversion.

Here, we will see how site speed affects different digital marketing factors:

1) SEO Ranking:
Your site’s speed is one of the significant factors that affect your rankings. A reasonable page load time is capped between 3 to 4 seconds or less. This time can vary, depending on the type of the industry and the site is. But if your site loads in less than 3 to 4 seconds, then you are doing a good job. But once you exceed the capped time limit for page load, you will see a drop in rankings, as well as a more inferior user experience. But when you get your site to load in 3 to 4 seconds, you will see better rankings.

2) UX and Conversion:
Your website’s UX (User Experience) affects SEO, paid search and paid social; that’s why you need to focus more on the site’s speed as it plays a direct role in UX. Slow websites have a low conversion rate, and the page visits are also on the lower side. A slow-loading site can frustrate people, making them move over to your competitor’s site. Do remember, bounce rate is a factor for ranking in SEO, therefore, make it a priority to reduce your bounce rate.

Businesses who have a long conversion funnel need to take extra care of their site speeds. When there are multiple pages and steps before conversion, the website needs to make sure all their pages are optimized to load fast. Also, with such sites, the complex conversion channel just amplifies the drop-off.

3) Paid Search:
Balancing cost-effective rates of keywords come down to strategizing PPC and site speed. Your website’s quality score will determine this factor. Referring to paid media, this quality score is dependent on how relevant Google finds your landing page to the search term. Google evaluates the UX based on how the person is directed to our page with the specific keyword. Slow site speed will, in the end, appear to Google as poor UX, which will result in reduced quality score.

4) Social Media Ads:
Just like Google’s paid ads, Facebook also favors high site speeds when prioritizing advertisements. Facebook tries to display the best results to suit your interests. In August 2017, Facebook’s algorithmic change preferred user experience, factoring site speeds. Facebook announced that the ads would be prioritized based on the site’s speed and user experience. A faster load time gave your ad a higher priority on the newsfeed, while slow load times caused your ad to be demoted or ignored.

Solution:
You can resolve the page speed issue, in 3 ways:

1. To curb the problems with site speeds, Google began the "speed" reports in analytics and webmaster. In webmaster, these reports are located under the enhancement section of Google's search console. These reports help you to find the sections and URLs of websites that affect the site's speed. Once the issues are recognized, you can start diagnosing and addressing these problems and optimize your page load times.

2. In Google Analytics, you can find these Site Speed reports under the Behavior section along with the suggestions that are specific to the improvement of your page. The recommendations explain why they're relevant to your site, and how you can implement them.

3. Other than the above two solutions, you can use many tools like page speed insights, gtmetrix tools for page speed optimization.
Therefore, a site’s speed is a very crucial factor for a lot of elements. Campaigns need to be customized as per the individual industry, model, and goals. The cumulative effect of all these factors shows why site speed is crucially important to your marketing campaigns. Contact Valuehits - affordable digital marketing agency to optimize your site speed.