You have a site that you think has been well optimized, on your different tags, on your texts,… But have you thought of looking at the loading time of your site? Indeed, the loading speed of a site is an element that is essential. It will not only play on your SEO, but also on the perception of your visitors. To fully answer this question, we must look at these two different typologies: the users (your visitors), but also the different search engines.
Small aside: this order is very important for us because we consider that a site is first and foremost a service provided to visitors, customers. The SXO can only be conceived by putting forward the Human and only then comes the referencing, hence our Human First policy. So, let’s start by looking at the importance of loading time for your visitors with some data from KissMetric.
Optimal loading time for your visitors
The first thing you need to preserve is the patience of your visitors. Indeed, almost 49% of users are not willing to wait more than 10 seconds on mobile for a page to load before leaving it. And even for a third of them, 5 seconds is a maximum. The longer your page takes to load, the more users will leave your site without even viewing it.
A website must deliver an experience, a service, an information to your visitors. It must live up to their expectations. When impatience rises, the user will be less attentive to your messages, but will look for just what he came for. And if your site is a bit complicated, with a lot of text, your impatient visitor will hardly read it. They will miss out on information that is essential to you or to them. They will leave your site disappointed and probably never come back.
Your website is like a restaurant where when you wait too long to be served, you walk away angry. The loading time is this service time. This example is probably enough to understand the importance of loading time for your visitors.
The speed of your site seen by search engines
Moreover, this loading time will be important for the different search engines. This is in two different ways. The first is that a high loading time will increase your bounce rate, but Google will also take it into account in the presentation of results. Indeed, a site that is too slow deteriorates the user experience and risks reducing the quality of services of the different search engines. This is actually one of the key points of Google’s July 2018 update.
The name of this update is very transparent: Google Speed Update. By degrading this quality, the price of Ads may mechanically fall, which is not a good thing for Google. It will therefore do everything to get the maximum with its advertising system. So, even if you don’t use Ads, you will be impacted.
Here is our second point, loading times too long will affect your crawl budget. Thus, the pages of your site will be much less often crawled (visited) by the Google robot. Your site will not be fully indexed…
Last words
As you can see, optimizing your loading time is an essential thing. Not only to offer your visitors the most perfect experience possible but also to ensure a good ranking on the various search engines.
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