Having a fast-loading website is key to search marketing success. Slow page speed and load time can drag your website rankings down, as well as disappoint your customers. But is your website a cheetah or a sloth? And how can professional services help you fix speed issues and remain consistent?
Page speed refers to how quickly your website pages load to display all content and the server to receive information. This is a key metric in your search marketing strategies, since a site with slow load times will have lower search visibility, traffic, and leads.
Google search algorithms use page speed as a factor in their ranking. When your pages take too long to load, the algorithm won’t display your website on search engine results pages. Google’s 2021 update now penalizes slow loading sites and will rank them below faster loading sites, regardless of content or other SEO.
And it’s not just the search engines you need to worry about. Customers will quickly grow irritated by slow loading sites. You’ve probably experienced this yourself when searching for a local business and becoming frustrated as the seconds pass and the page hasn’t loaded. Often, after only a few moments, you’ll leave the website and go find a competitor that has a quicker site.
In fact, data shows that 47% of customers expect a site to load in less than two seconds. After that point, customers start to bounce and leave your pages.
In order to help speed up websites, professionals can employ a number of different techniques that will improve page speed, including:
Search marketing is a complicated business, and it takes a lot of time and devotion in order to maintain best practices to improve your speed across all your pages. When your website doesn’t have a fast load time, you can go through serious repercussions from search engines, damaging your search marketing efforts.
Experts who are professionals in the field of page speed and load time can help your site go from slow to speedy more efficiently and with a better strategy than a DIY patch job. When you have a team of professionals from a search marketing agency on your side, you don’t have to worry about missing key page load elements and can instead focus your time on other tasks.
If your website is a sloth and you find yourself overwhelmed with keeping all the practices that increase page speed in mind, our agency is here to help. At Deesse Media, we’ll walk you through the steps to improve loading times. Contact us to start a site audit today.
