Google announced a few months ago that page speed is going to be a signal in rankings. How fast your web pages load can affect conversions, so you need to make sure that your pages are loading as fast as possible.
Maile Ohye posted a video on Google’s Webmaster blog presenting the case for speeding up your website, along with tools that can help you solve the issues you find. Maile also covered some interesting data points from Shopzilla, Firefox, Google and Microsoft.
When content was exactly the same and only page speed was factored in A/B testing:
- Shopzilla experienced a 7-12% increase in conversions
- Firefox had a 15.4% increase in downloads, which is an estimated 60 million extra downloads
Google and Microsoft artificially introduced delayed results of .5 seconds and saw a reduced user satisfaction of almost 1%. When delayed by 2 seconds, user satisfaction was reduced nearly 4%.
On the bright side, many issues affecting page speed are front-end specific and can easily be combated with minor adjustments. With just a few tools and a little knowledge, you can easily increase your page speed and conversions.