When it comes to the digital space, you literally have seconds to grasps the attention of your potential customers. According to a study performed by Microsoft Corp, the average person’s attention span is about 8 seconds! This is actually not too hard to believe when we consider the fact that we are in the age of TikTok and Instagram where content is being fed to us instantly with the scroll of a finger. With people being accustom to this type of instant feed, you could only imagine how much time you really have to grasp the attention of users visiting your website; this is why website speed or performance is crucial.
Website speed refers to the amount of time it takes a browser to fully load your website. On average, a person expects a website to load within 2 – 3 seconds of clicking or searching your URL in the address bar of the browser. The average load time for pages on desktop computers is 3 seconds and 5 seconds on mobile devices. There are some patient visitors out there that may wait a little longer but if your website takes over five seconds to load, then you’re in dangerous territory. The longer the load time, the higher the bounce rate; the percentage of users who visit the site and bounce (leave) instead of remaining on the site. The slower the site, the higher the bounce rate and the percentage increase between seconds is drastic.
If visitors are not waiting for your site to fully load before they bounce, this means they are going to choose other options. Other affects include a reduced conversion rate and users may question the safety, trustworthiness, dependability and professionalism of your site and business overall. Website speed also affect your rankings in Google and other search engines.
There are a lot of free tools online that will help you determine your website speed. These tools help to assess the areas of your site to improve your website speed.
Pingdom Website Speed Test – https://tools.pingdom.com/
Google Developer Page Speed Insights – https://pagespeed.web.dev/
GTmetrix – https://gtmetrix.com/
Web Page Test by Catchpoint – https://webpagetest.org/
