Do you hate waiting? We all do, especially when living in a world that is so dynamic and fast-moving. People are becoming increasingly impatient and demanding when it comes to services, so they are no longer satisfied with just good services - they also expect them to be fast. The Internet is no exception – your page must deliver the proper content, and it must do so quickly.

    Google "likes fast" loading pages

In the early days of the Internet, it was absolutely normal to wait up to a minute (even more) for a page to load. Those times are long gone, and now people want their content now. More and more of the visits are also coming from mobile devices. Alarmingly, according to Google, the average time to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds. Even more alarming is the fact that 53% of the visits are abandoned if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. The situation with desktop sites is pretty much the same – the longer it takes to load, the greater the chance you lose a potential customer. This is bad news for your business. Google announced that page speed would be taken into account when ranking back in 2010. This was expected, given that a fast-loading site has a better chance of keeping visitors on it, as they have a quick and positive browsing experience (content also matters, of course).

You can instantly check what your response time is and how your page performs by using our Free Test Tools, and in particular, the Web Page Speed Test.

    Page Loading Speed is Important to Visitors

Fast-loading pages create good user experiences. It is no secret that a good user experience drastically increases your chances of conversions. For some websites, such as e-commerce sites, page speed should actually be the top priority. For example, in 2012, when Walmart discovered that it was not the fastest retail site on the Internet (compared to Amazon, eBay, etc.), it improved its loading times (source). The results are the following:

• For every 1 second of improvement, they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions.
• For every 100 ms of improvement, they grew incremental revenue by up to 1%

Do you still think that shaving off a couple of seconds of your website will not affect your sales?

    What Can You Do to Improve Loading Times?

Use a monitoring service – Monitoring your website 24/7 is crucial when you need to ensure it is always available and blazing fast. www.websitepulse.com offers various monitoring levels and tools to help you identify if and why your website is slow. Our Full-Page level of monitoring will check all the page components and report their individual loading times. The First byte, Last byte, and DNS response times are also provided. This monitoring level simulates a first-time user experience, where no content has been previously cached. Let's say the site's uptime times are pretty good, but you are afraid that they might decrease and you will not be able to react accordingly (due to server issues, code issues, etc.)? We got you covered. You can set up a specific response time threshold, and if we detect that your site takes longer to load than the specified time, you will receive an immediate alert via one of several options – text messages, voice calls, emails, etc.

We also provide a monitoring that simulates a repeated-user experience. This is our Performance level of monitoring, and it will only load the HTML content of your page, excluding images and other page components.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – If your content is distributed across different geographical regions, the delivery should not rely on the proximity of your clients to your web server. The Content Delivery Network uses servers located in other data centers. This means that the content delivered to your users will be handled by the server that is the closest one to their location.

Large Images and Embedded Videos - If you have large-resolution images that load on your page by default, you are in for trouble. Some photos can easily exceed 4-5 megabytes in size, which can significantly impact your page load speed. We recommend using PNG or JPEG compressed images in suitable web resolutions and utilizing photo extender tools when adjusting aspect ratios for optimal web display.

Embedded videos that play automatically are also a huge traffic eater. Let the user decide if they would like to watch the video or not.

Cheap Shared Web Hosts - Hosting your website on a shared hosting plan is a gamble, and if this is the case with your website, whose speed you are really concerned about, then you should consider changing your hosting provider. Look for a reliable company that offers close to 100% uptime, guaranteed speeds, and a reputable history. In the end, no matter how optimized your website is, slow and unreliable servers can make the site really unpleasant to visit.

So, how does your site perform on a day-to-day basis? Create a 30-day free trial account here and find out.