Imagine this scenario. You Google something, but you’re not sure what you’re looking for so you click on a few different links. Then, you notice the web page you opened isn’t loading quickly. Do you wait for it to load? Or, do you click the back button, and try a different site?

Why Site Speed is Important

We’ve all been there before. Chances are that like most people, you’re going to click the back button. This is a little problem with web traffic known as bounce rate. Essentially, it’s the percentage of people who are coming to your site, and clicking the back button to leave. A web site with a slow loading time can be a major problem when it comes to bounce rate. A great website for finding out your site’s speed is Pingdom Tools. Pingdom will quickly tell you how long it takes your page to load. Google Analytics can also tell you the site speed of each page on your web site over a given period of time. You can also find the bounce rate for each page here.

There are different factors that could affect your site speed. These include the size of the images on your site, the amount of content on each page, and where your domain is hosted. If you’re experiencing slow site speed this is where you want to look first.

Site speed is also something that we look for when we do our SEO evaluations, and it’s something that could decrease your overall score. It accounts for 5% of your score when we evaluate a website. Ideally, you would want your website to load in under five seconds, because let’s face it- who has five seconds to wait for a web page to load.