Quality content is essential for getting visitors to your website. This makes sense—when people visit a website, they are chiefly interested in the content. Keeping it relevant and updated translates into higher search ranking, more page views, and higher visitor loyalty.
However, you should not overlook the importance of website speed. We live in fast times with fast internet connections and everyone wants web pages to load almost instantly. In a way, visitors prefer a faster website to one with better content.
Website Speed
In fact, the Hosting Tribunal points out that most visitors won’t even look at the content of a page that takes over 3 seconds to load. If it’s just the pictures that don’t load quickly, 39% of visitors will leave. Any amount of delay matters; even 1 second added to the loading time could mean 11% fewer page views.
Luckily, this means improving load times can increase traffic. Fast websites soar to the top of search result lists, attract more visitors, and have more people return.
Numerous examples support this. SmartFurniture.com improved their speed and increased traffic generated by search engines by 20%. Yahoo! achieved a 9% traffic increase by reducing their load times by 0.4 seconds. As for online stores, Walmart’s conversion rate increased by 2% per second of improvement.
Good Content and Speed Improvement
Truth be told, without good content, no amount of speed improvement can help. But if you are investing time and resources into creating content which appeals to visitors, it is worthwhile to make sure it reaches them quickly.
Maintaining high speeds is definitely in any website owner’s best interest. If you would like to learn more about the effects of website speed and the improvements you can make, take a look at the infographic below.
Thanks to our friends at HostingTribunal.com for this informative infographic.
