When you're looking for something online and you come across a webpage that loads at the blink of an eye – or faster – how does that make you feel? Does it enhance your experience or detract from it?Obviously, everyone loves to have their information served up at ludicrous speed. And not only is page speed important for enhancing user experience, it’s a critical yet sometimes overlooked variable when it comes to search engine optimization as well.

Site Speed Matters to Users

Users love it when a page loads in their browser quickly. Users are fickle and they know that if they don’t find what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll easily find it on another site. If it takes more than three or four seconds for a page to load, users have a tendency to get antsy and and click away, resulting in high bounce rates, lower conversions, and lost revenue.Fact is, a simple Google search yields a plethora of information on any given query. And your website isn’t the only game in town. When a user clicks on your listing, you should be ready to serve your content up to them as quickly as possible.

Speed Matters to Google Too

Google’s primary mission is to help its users find the best quality information as quickly as possible. That’s precisely why site speed has become a major ranking factor for Google. While having quality content has always been key, the overall user experience is also hugely important.Google wants to provide its own users with the best quality results possible. That's why a site with mediocre content may very well rank higher than your site if its pages load in half the time. The content itself isn't enough to provide the best experience for users.Site speed also makes it easier for Google to index your content. While users should always be the top priority, it's important to also consider the time required for search engines to crawl all the pages within your site. The faster your site loads, the faster the search engine can crawl your site, decipher its content, and rank it accordingly.

Mobile User Experience is Critical

Take a look at your Google Analytics account and check out the devices being used to view your site. More and more users are probably using a tablet or smartphone to access your content.While the rise in mobile usage adds many challenges surrounding the design of your site and the flexibility of your user interface, it’s also important to think how users behave on their mobile devices compared to desktop users. Desktop users may be a little fickle and antsy, but mobile users are downright impatient. They're on the go and demand information to be served up quickly.Optimizing your site’s loading speed is increasingly critical for any site that has a large percentage of mobile visits. In fact, the mobile user experience is becoming more important that the desktop experience as consumers in general are replacing traditional desktop computers with tablets and larger smartphones.

A Faster Site Equals More Revenue

A faster website can translate into a better user experience, higher rankings in search engines, and lower bounce rates. For ecommerce sites in particular, pages that load faster translate into the ability to sell products to customers more efficiently with higher conversion rates.Numerous case studies have been written on the importance of speediness in ecommerce. Companies like Walmart have noticed that site speed had a huge impact on its business. In 2012, the retail giant confirmed that conversion rates were at their highest when pages took just one or two seconds to load, but greatly decreased as page loading time increased.Walmart even went on to buy site-speed optimization startup Torbit soon after the aforementioned case study was published, further signaling the critical correlation between the time it takes for a website to load and their core business metrics.

Tools and Resources

Here is a list of tools and resources that will help you test and resolve speed issues on your site:

Google PageSpeed Insights – This is one of the best tools to analyze the speed of your website. Not only does it break down how your website is loading on both mobile and desktop platforms, but it also provides specific details on what you should fix to improve speediness.

Pingdom Speed Test – This tool will breakdown all the individual requests done to load a page. It will also show how the page is loading in other parts of the world.

WP Super Cache – If you’re running a site on WordPress, this is one of the best caching plugins out there. Basically, when someone visits your site, it will serve them a static html file from your dynamic WordPress site, instead of serving up WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache – This is another great caching plug-in for WordPress. While I personally haven’t used this one, it has received great reviews and appears to be more robust and feature-rich than many other caching plug-ins.

CloudFlare – This is a great service that acts as a proxy between your visitors and your website’s servers. According to CloudFlare, the average website or blog will load nearly twice as fast when the service has been activated, so its definitely worth a look.

Closing Thoughts

While sites like Amazon and Walmart have made great case studies on site speed, all websites stand to benefit from speedier loading. Here are a few additional tips to help speed things up:

• Reduce the amount of JavaScript on pages.

• Compress images to keep file size around 100 kb or less.

• Avoid adding plugins whenever possible.

• Utilize browser caching.

• Splurge on quality web hosting.

And if you’re using WordPress:

• WP Super Cache and CloudFlare will be especially useful to give your site a boost.

• You should also remove unneeded plugins from time to time. The more plugins you have installed, the more they will affect your site’s performance.

• Using a good theme with your WordPress installation will also help speed things up. The more bells and whistles, the more likely it will take longer to load.

Users expect to get what they need at faster and faster speeds. To ensure they have the best experience, and to boost traffic from search and reduce bounce rates, make sure to pay attention to load times. Your users – and search engines – will be glad you did.