Why Are Page Load Speeds So Important For User Experience?
There are many elements that play a pivotal role to the overall success of your website, from an aesthetically appealing design, to intuitive navigation – but one element in particular can arguably have the biggest impact: your page load speed.
Nobody wants things to be slow. We want our food to be fast (even when we’re in restaurants), our commutes to be quick and our TV shows to be bingeable. So when we’re searching online and encounter a site that takes just a few seconds too long to load, we’ll close that tab and move on..
Meeting expectations
Yes people expect super quick online user experiences, and expectations continue to rise, putting pressure on sites to load faster and faster. A site that simply isn’t fully optimised for faster loading times will cause the overall UX to collapse, and result in the user clicking the back button or exiting the site completely.
Mobile speed matters
People surf the web on all sorts of devices these days, often browsing away on their smartphones, consuming websites at their fingertips.
Users who frequently visit sites on a smartphone will want their devices to load websites even faster than they would on a desktop. Usually because as they’re trying to scroll through your site, they’ll be rushing to work, or fervently queueing for their daily triple, venti, half sweet, non-fat, vanilla latte – we’ve all been there.
So when it comes to optimising your page load speeds for mobile, every kilobyte counts. By not putting your website’s loading time on the back burner, you can improve the overall UX on any device, generate more revenue, and keep users coming back.
It can impact your conversions
If your load times aren’t up to scratch and your UX suffers, then this will definitely have a direct impact on your site’s conversions.
Even major established sites such as Amazon, have reported that a 100 millisecond decrease in their site speed, can cost them up to 1% in sales. When Google experienced an increase of .5 seconds to their search page generation time, they found their overall traffic dropped by 20%.
Making sure that page load performance is up to scratch could easily result in more loyalty to your site, which will see customers returning to buy from your site again. The less freezing, crashing, and loading your users have to put up with, the more conversions you’ll gain.
Need help getting faster?
To sum up, your page load speed and overall site performance essentially is your user experience. Having a fast site will build trust, yield more returning customers, lead to them choosing you over a competitor, and help raise the profile of your brand.
However, as highly experienced Episerver (now Optimizely) web developers, we know that modern sites are under increased pressure to provide rich content and more dynamic elements, like beautiful animations, larger image files, and complex graphics. Adding more of these elements can often come at a tradeoff with loading speeds.
But not to worry, complexity is what we do best!
And our specialists can put performance, and user experience first when it comes to building or enhancing your website. If you’d like to chat to us today, and see how we can help you achieve better results, give us a call on 0161 260 1500 – or drop us a message info@ultimedia.agency.
