How Important are Fast Load Times in Web Hosting?

Anyone who owns a website, or is thinking about starting up a website, knows how important load times are. Or at least they think they do. But while website owners may have the general knowledge that slow page loading times means fewer visitors and therefore, fewer profits, how many really know the actual statistics? Because they are there, and they certainly show just how much slow loading pages can cost a website and subsequently, a business.

All you have to do to really see the difference that fast-loading pages make is look at two very big websites: Mozilla, and Amazong. After working with their web host, and within their own website, Mozilla was able to shave off a measly two seconds off their page load times. But that small two seconds gained Mozilla a huge 15.4 per cent more conversions. That means more people were actually clicking within the site and delving deeper within it. And that means Mozilla made more money. Amazon on the other hand, unwittingly had their page times slowed by just 0.1 of a second; and they saw a 1 per cent decrease in revenue.

Those lost profits all come down to users – visitors who either use the website, or don’t. So it’s important to also know how slow-loading pages affect those visitors. 47 per cent of users have said that they expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less; while 40 per cent of them said that they would leave a website if it took three seconds or more to load. Online shoppers on the hand expect extremely fast loading times, with 52 per cent of shoppers saying that they think merchant sites should have faster loading times than other sites.

Yes, users are important, especially when it comes to your load times. These stats certainly prove that. But in addition to users, it’s also the search engines that are looking at your page loading time, and using it to determine whether you have a good website or not. Google, the number one search engine used by webpage visitors has recently stated on their own blog, “At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making websites load and display faster improves the user’s experience and helps them become more productive.”

Before now, Google had used really only two measuring tools in their ranking process: the relevancy of a website in relation to the search query, and the number of incoming and outgoing links any one website contained. Now though, as Google continues to want to improve a user’s experience (so that people will continue using their search engine,) they’ve also focused on loading times. And they’re not the only ones. Bing, Yahoo, MSN, and others are all starting to focus more and more on page load times.

It all really comes down to user experience, whether it’s the search engines or the website owners that are concerned about it. If you’re a website owner, you need to speak to your web host about load times. While there are things you can do yourself to lessen your load time (such as remove images from your site,) there may also be certain strategies that only your web host can implement for you.