You know the story about the Tortoise and the Hare? How slow and steady wins the race? Yeah, that’s not the case with your website’s speed. If you’re placing your bets on the Tortoise in this competition, you will be left behind.
In this post, we’re doing a deep dive into the whirlwind world of website speed. Buckle up as we explore why a speedy site is your weapon, how those precious seconds impact your bottom line, and what you can do to ensure your visitors stick around long enough to fall in love with what your sites have to offer. Let’s rev up those engines and get your site blazing fast!
How Fast is Fast?
When people think of website speed, it’s mainly how quickly the site loads. But how soon should your website load?
Studies show that your website should load in under 3 seconds. Any longer than that and users are likely to become impatient and leave. We tell our clients to aim for a load time of 1–2 seconds to ensure a smooth and satisfying user experience. The faster, the better.
And here’s why…
Why Site Speed is Important
1. First Impressions
How long does it take for a user to form an impression about your site—whether they love it or hate it? Research shows that it’s just 50 milliseconds. When it comes to making a positive impact on your potential customer, even milliseconds count!
It’s simple psychology. If your website loads quickly, you’ve instantly nailed that first impression. You don’t get a second shot here. Fast websites are perceived as professional and reliable. We instinctively equate speed with efficiency, trustworthiness, and competence. A fast website tells visitors you value their time and are on top of your game, setting the stage for a positive interaction.
“First impressions are extremely important. A slow website opens up questions and doubts. If the site is slow, what else is wrong with it? Is it safe? Is the company reliable? Do these people know what they’re doing?”
Nick Stiles, Director of Development at Nerder
2. User Experience
Here at Nerder, if you’ve had a conversation with one of our developers, you know we love talking about user experience and UX design. We feel that website speed goes hand in hand with these two. It comes down to a bunch of things, really, if you want to set yourself apart from the sea of competition:
- Keep the website design short, sweet, and simple. This will somewhat help with page speed.
- Give your visitors exactly what they’re looking for.
- And give it to them fast.
There’s research that shows that almost 70% of consumers say that page speed affects their willingness to buy. So if your website is slow, there’s a good chance they may get frustrated and leave because of poor user experience.
If your users see longer page load times or poor response time to user action and they have to wait—BAM! Down goes user experience. As website speed slows, user experience goes down as well. Simple.
3. Decreases Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page and is heavily influenced by site speed. How much? Glad you asked. According to Google’s mobile bounce rate statistics, “As page load time goes from one second to five seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 90%.”
The BBC confirmed this, finding that they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load . So, if your website is taking too long to load, you best believe potential customers are taking their business elsewhere.
4. Increases Conversion
The correlation between site speed and conversion rates is not just anecdotal; if you take a look at your analytics, you’ll see this story playing out. We have.
Take retailer AutoAnything, for instance. They experienced a remarkable 13% increase in sales after cutting their page load time in half. Walmart also noticed a 2% increase in conversion rate after they reduced page load time from 8 seconds to 6.
That isn’t a coincidence. It’s not magic—it’s simply that faster websites reduce ‘friction’, making it easier for customers to complete purchases without frustration. The quicker each page of your site loads, the less time users spend waiting and the more likely they are to convert.
5. SEO Rankings on Google
OK, so there’s a lot going on here. Google hasn’t exactly been very forthcoming about this whole thing. Is page speed linked to SEO rankings? To some extent, yes. Let’s clear this up.
In 2018, Google launched something that was dubbed the ‘Speed Update’. That meant speed would be a ranking factor for mobile searches. BUT—only slow-loading websites would be affected; meaning you wouldn’t get a boost in ranking for a speedy website, but you would be penalized for a slow one. Fun stuff.
Then in 2021, we hear that there’s an update in page experience algorithm—page speed and user experience are now linked. Core Web Vitals state that website speed is an essential ranking factor. But that’s not something we believe should be placed front and center.
The truth is, Google’s algorithms keep changing; the SEO game is always evolving. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that website speed is a ‘big defining factor’ in SEO; however, what we can say with certainty is that having a website that loads quickly definitely doesn’t hurt. And if Google had to choose between two or three relevant websites with relevant content, both of which are competing for visibility, it may come down to the page speed.
6. E-commerce Sales
We love numbers, so let’s break this down. A 2020 YOTTAA study showed that 9 out of 10 shoppers would abandon their purchase if an e-commerce site suffered from sluggish load times. 57% of people would move on to your competitor’s site, and 14% of them would never return to your site.
And there’s more. According to a survey including 2,000 American shoppers, 50% said they’re less likely to buy something online if the entire checkout process takes more than 30 seconds. Yes, this also means having too many steps in the checkout process, but we can’t overlook the possibility that any delay in speed that exceeds that half-a-minute mark could mean lost revenue for your business.
Making sure your site is fast keeps potential customers on the ‘path to purchase’, boosting your e-commerce success, especially during those big, every-sale-counts moments like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, New Year’s, Fourth of July, etc.
“70% of people feel that a website’s loading time affects their decision to make a purchase. People want immediate gratification and don’t want to jump hoops to get it.”
Nick Stiles, Director of Development at Nerder
7. Customer Retention & Loyalty
We like to call this loyalty in the fast lane. Fast-loading pages create a smooth, pleasant experience that keeps customers happy and eager to return. It’s like having their favorite dish served promptly every single time. In fact, nearly 50% of consumers say they’re willing to skip the animation or other multimedia features for a faster-loading website.
The takeaway? A fast website isn’t just about making a good impression; it’s about building and maintaining long-term customer loyalty. By keeping your site speedy, you ensure your visitors have a positive experience, making them more likely to return and become loyal customers.
10 Website Speed Optimization Tips
OK, so now we know why website speed is important and that you can increase your bottom line significantly by simply shaving off a few precious seconds in load time. But how do you do that?
Tip # 1: Audit Your Site
Start with a thorough audit of your website. Most clients will use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights that evaluate their Core Web Vitals on both desktop and mobile and provide valuable insights into what’s slowing your site down. The results you get are broken down into color-coded scores that give you an idea of how your overall website performes, areas that need improvement, etc.
Here’s what an assessment for Walmart.com looks like.
When we run a website audit, we’re not just looking at this; we’re also factoring in actual experience across devices. That means checking your website’s speed on different devices at different times to get a ‘real-world’ feel. There’s a lot to it, so these tools give you a basic idea, not the entire picture.
Tip # 2: Fix Glaring Issues
A lot of the time, we have clients who come to us with a laundry list of web speed issues that need to be fixed immediately. It’s tempting, right? We know the problems; now let’s dive head first to fix them all at once. BUT—even if you had unlimited resources, we still wouldn’t recommend this approach. Prioritization is key to effective optimization.
Instead of tackling all the issues simultaneously, we focus on what matters most to your visitors:
- Prioritize the most important fixes – Prioritize fixes that directly impact user experience and retention. If your site takes a significant amount of time to start loading, this will be our top priority. Visitors are unlikely to stick around if the page itself is slow to load.
- Address server-side concerns and hosting issues – Shared hosting might be cheaper but can slow down your site. Consider upgrading to VPS or dedicated hosting.
- Address DNS Issues – Incorrectly configured DNS can delay initial load times.
Tip # 3: Identify Poor-Performing and Unnecessary Plugins
As developers, we love plug-ins or add-ons. They serve a purpose, for sure. If used correctly, they can help power and manage your website. But some plugins can bog down your site. When evaluating plug-ins, we ask ourselves two questions:
- Do you absolutely need it? Is it adding value to your website management?
- Is this the latest and fastest version of the plug-in?
If you’ve answered no to both, remove or update it. There’s no need for you to have something on your website that doesn’t serve a purpose, and is slowing it down. Talk about lose-lose.
“Relying heavily on plugins is not the best way to build a website. A robust website should have a strong backend with minimal and optimal dependency on plugins. Overuse of plugins is typically the #1 performance killer and poses significant security threats. We believe good coding practices will always outweigh the convenience of plugins.”
Nick Stiles, Director of Development at Nerder
Tip # 4: Caching
Instead of repeatedly fetching the same data from the server every time a user visits, caching stores copies of these data elements in temporary storage locations. You have elements like images,that don’t need to be re-downloaded on every visit, significantly reducing page load times and making your site feel faster. In essence, caching streamlines the data delivery process, ensuring users get what they’re looking for faster and effortlessly.
Tip # 5: Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Every time someone wants to access your site, they must travel from their location to where your website is hosted. The farther they are, the longer it takes.
Here’s where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes in. A CDN is a network of servers strategically placed around the globe. These servers store cached copies of your website’s static content—images, CSS files, JavaScript—closer to your users. When someone visits your website, the CDN selects the server closest to them to deliver the content. This reduces the physical distance data needs to travel, speeding up load times.
When we’re selecting a CDN for our clients, we like to consider factors like server locations, your budget, performance metrics, security features, and ease of integration with your existing infrastructure. This is a big decision.
Tip # 6: Limit Those Redirects
We’ve seen a lot of digital marketing managers who love redirects. Don’t get us wrong, they’re great. It helps you connect those high-ranking pages to new content and leverage some credibility. But we have one word: moderation (keep that in mind; we’ll be saying that a lot more ahead).
Moderation is important here because each redirect adds extra time to the page load. Minimize the number of redirects to streamline your site’s loading process. We want to direct users straight to their destination without unnecessary detours.
Tip # 7: Cut Down HTTP Requests
When users visit a webpage, their browser sends an HTTP request to the website’s server. The server responds by sending the requested file back to the browser. This file includes stuff like text, images, formatting (CSS), etc. Now, if the initial file doesn’t contain everything needed to render the page (which it often doesn’t), the browser makes additional requests for each missing resource. Again and again. Each of these requests takes time to process, and the more requests there are—you guessed it—the longer it takes for the page to load fully. This can slow down your website and frustrate users by making too many requests.
Remember we talked about moderation? Here we are again. It’s important for your developers to reduce the number of these requests and remove unnecessary elements.
Tip # 8: Track 404 Errors and Review Error Logs
This is what pops up when your visitors try to access pages that are deleted or moved. Regularly track 404 errors and review your error logs. Fixing broken links and addressing errors makes sure that your users aren’t slowed down by missing pages or malfunctioning features.
Summary: Faster is Always Better!
Website speed isn’t just a technical detail; it’s a critical factor that can make or break your site’s online presence, bounce rate, leads generated, conversion rate, sales closed, and long-term loyalty.
But don’t worry; there are plenty of ways to put the pedal to the metal. Nerder’s website speed optimization services can help you get an edge over your competition and deliver a smoother, faster website with a top-notch user experience.Ask yourself: Is your website able to keep up with the race? If not, let’s talk.
