Dan Soschin

Does Page Load Time Matter?

Does the speed at which your web pages load really matter, especially in this day and age where broadband is becoming ubiquitous?

YES!

It still matters, and perhaps more than ever as devices uncouple from broadband networks and switch over to mobile networks where loading clunky pages with heavy plug-ins and images can cause exceptionally high bounce rates.

And, page load time heavily influences both PAID and ORGANIC search rates. If you are wondering what the impact is on your sites performance, check out this ClickZ.com article written by Bryan Eisenberg. Bryan states that by adding a second to your page’s load time you could be risking 7% of your traffic.

Worse yet is that some sites take more than just a few seconds to load… they take north of 10 seconds. Image what shaving a few seconds off could do to your user experience and bounce rate?

But where to get started? Landing page optimization is a heavy science and you can spend a lot of time optimizing various parts including:

  1. javaScript
  2. plug-ins
  3. CSS
  4. HTML
  5. Flash
  6. Image compression
  7. Content
All of these factors can be optimized to reduce your pages load time. So, stop wasting time and start optimizing. The easiest place to start is with your images. From there, I would recommend understanding the value you are getting from the social plug-ins. How many people visit your page and how many are “liking” or “+1″ing your page? Is that number of people worth adding an extra half a second to load all those plug-ins? I bet you it isn’t!

Dan Soschin

, , ,
%d bloggers like this: