It’s the age of instant gratification, let’s face it. Beauty and design are certainly important, but there are few things about a website that will annoy your audience more than slow load times. Fair or not, amazing features be darned, above all else your prospective clients, customers or patients expect a fast loading website that does so on all devices. In fact, according to Adobe, 39% of visitors will stop engaging with a website if images take too long to load or won’t load at all. However, don’t think that you can throw out the “design baby” with the bathwater. According to that same source, 38% of people will end their engagement with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.
These statistics are certainly solid incentive to design a both beautiful and speedy website. In addition, there’s another big reason to speed things up on the horizon with serious SEO implications. Google has already started ranking websites it deems “mobile friendly” higher in it’s mobile search results and another factor is soon to to effect those rankings. You guessed it: Site speed or PageSpeed. If your mobile, static or responsive website loads slowly on mobile devices it may soon see it’s rankings dropping in mobile search. So there are two factors you should check for in regards to mobile search: whether your website is tagged with the “mobile friendly” label in search and whether your website loads quickly (preferably in 1-3 seconds). You can test your mobile and desktop PageSpeed via Google’s tool here. This is a handy free tool that will analyze you how your website can be cleaned up to load quicker.
Are you ready to have a beautiful, fast and modern website designed for your small business, law firm, or dental practice? Contact New Wine Web design today!
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (6/5/2016) karamsingh (Flickr)