Take Site Speed Seriously

Site Speed Impacts User Experience

You should take your site speed seriously. Everyone on your team — stakeholders, leadership, marketing, IT etc. — should understand how vital page speed is to the digital experiences they are creating, and will take ownership of. Make sure your digital partners feels the same about it as well. Markets get more and more competitive, and potential customers will leave your site in a heartbeat if the user experience fails — even falters slightly. Slow loading sites are at the top of the list of reasons why people abandon sites in search of another one. Not only does a slow loading website destroy user experience, page speed can also impact SEO ranking and organic traffic.

PageSpeed Insights Tool

Most developers are aware of the different tools that can help analyze, and monitor a site’s speed. Arguably one of the most prominent ones available is Google’s PageSpeed Insights report. Googe introduced the Chrome User Experience Report in Q4 of 2017, and earlier this month just announced that PageSpeed Insights will be using real-world data from that report. Now consider that the Chrome browser occupied about 60% of the browser market share in 2017 — it’s time to pay more attention to page speed. If you’re involved with, or responsible for your organization’s website, it’s good to have a basic level of understanding of what page speed is and how it can impact the overall effectiveness and performance of the organization’s digital experience. Here’ are a couple of good resources to start with and get yourself familiarized with the concept of page speed.

About PageSpeed Insights

Good, bad, or ugly — PageSpeed Insights evaluates how well a page follows common performance best practices and computes a score from 0-100 that estimates its performance headroom.

Things Just Got Real

Learn about the the Chrome User Experience Report and how it will feed data to PageSpeed Insights to make better recommendations for developers and how the optimization score has been tuned to be more aligned with the real-world data.

This isn’t a paradigm shift, by any means, but don’t think for a second that page speed doesn’t matter. It’s going to matter more, and especially as Google continues to roll out the mobile-first index.

Main photo by Jake Givens on Unsplash