Making sure your website is optimized for smooth and fast performance is critical in Google’s eyes. And not only in Google’s eyes, but for your potential customers as well. Several different factors determine how well your website is optimized, like total number of requests, compressed and resized images, file sizes, minimizing redirects, leveraging browser caching, and much more.
Impatiently Waiting
It’s been proven time and time again that people of our age are becoming more impatient. We all want things done at the snap of a finger, right? At least when we are browsing mobile apps or websites, right? Because when users search for content, they want it fast. But what happens if your website is loading too slow? People become too impatient even after 5 measly seconds. So then what happens is people will hit the back button to find another similar company/service, or find another way to navigate away from your website. YOU DO NOT WANT PEOPLE TO NAVIGATE AWAY FROM YOUR SITE! You want to keep your users within your website, keeping them focused on your services and products. Not only does a fast-performing website deliver content to your users quicker, but Google also looks at how fast your website loads. If Google takes this rule into consideration while ranking your website, then of course this needs some attention. After all, you most likely have some competition in your market and you should always be fighting to rank higher than your competitors when it comes to Google search.
How Well Does Your Site Perform?
There are several websites to visit that will measure the overall performance of your website. They can offer statistics like how long your web page takes to load, total number of requests, server response time, file sizes for each file loaded within the page, a performance grade, and much, much more.
I have included a screenshot below of my own website’s performance that was measured by Pingdom Tools Website Speed Test.
As you see, Pingdom Tools Website Speed Test shows a loading time under 1 second with a small number of 28 requests. It also shows that my website is faster than 93% of all tested websites with a performance grade of 97. Although every website can differ greatly, you want to shoot for the best numbers possible every time! So go ahead and give your website a test. Or test any website you want to compare numbers!