In this digital era, businesses are shifting towards online. From selling to marketing everything happens online. Covid also has sped up the process of online dependency further and a lot of automation. If you do not have a website for your business you are doomed. Online presence with your website and social media brings all the differences. The other day we read a story where a customer was trying to a buy phone cover. Now they liked this beautiful cover of a company they never heard of. So what they did is Google’d the name of the company, browsed through their website, and meticulously checked out their social media page, followings, and engagement. Since the company's presence online was strong they took it as a legit company and bought the product. For a company, it was a win situation where they Google for a phone cover and popped this lovely phone cover from a company they did not know only to buy it within 5 to 7 minutes after the research on the company online. SO, yes online presence matters but what also matters is how fast the whole process was. If it wasn’t for the speed of the website of the company including loading the pages of the website and social media pages, do you think the customer would have had such patience and time to wait for another half an hour? They would have quit only to find another company. So the real question is does the website speed matter? Does the Google website speed test matter? The answer is a big YES. In the above example, it was clear the company could convert one customer within and under ten minutes of their browsing because they as a brand had a great and strong online presence and their website speed was swift. It took them under ten minutes to decide and buy. As per the research around 47 to 50% of the population exit the website if its loading time is more. Customers do not wait for more than two seconds for a web page to load. So this brings us to three major reasons why website speed is crucial and why the Google website speed test is a must
1. High speed ensures the experience and helps in decision-making. We have seen from the above example how a swift website could be able to convert a customer within 5 minutes of their browsing about the company and their website. Besides, it also ensures a lot of engagement for the customer with your website page or social media page. The more swift your website page is the better are the chances of a customer spending more time engaging with the content and hook up their attention. Sure shot start to success, we say!
2. Speed impacts the SEO ranking. Oh yes, Google has been very clear that they are obsessed with speed. As per Google, the fast load website page speed has a positive impact on the SEO ranking of the brand page. One reason that out of all the other companies the customer in our earlier example could see the company’s phone cover is that the website speed and content quality made it stand out on SEO ranking and they popped in the first page with the first one to three rankings. Google website speed test makes it easy to ensure that the speed is as per the Google standard and therefore ensuring a good SEO ranking. Of course, there are many other factors to the SEO ranking but speed is one of the major factors.
3. The speed of your website will impact your sales. In our earlier example, it is clear as crystal that company could convert a new customer because of their good speed of the website, of course adding to that their online presence, content, etc. would have played a role too. But within 5 minutes of browsing the company could convert a new person as their customer, the credit goes to the swiftness of the website.
So now if you wish to rank better in the SEO and convert more sales online by providing an enriching experience to your potential customer you better pull up your sock and get your Google Website speed test done. That will ensure that your customers do not exit your website because of the loading time. Now of course the quality of the image and content has to be interesting to hook them up but speed takes the base of it all.