Have you ever encountered a sluggish webpage? When browsing for something on the internet, you deemed a website could provide or solve? What was your reaction? If so, there is a high probability that your psych to continue perusing through the contents of the site folded up and dissolved like a circus leaving town. You must have certainly left for a platform that less tests your patience with better speed performance.
A bounce happens when a visitor logs onto your website and do nothing entirely on the webpage they accessed. The person simply visits and leaves without further interacting with your site. Thus, a bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who bounce off your website within a given period.
Out of all the factors that influence the bounce rate of a website, page loading speeds are among the leading raucous contributors to high bounce rates. To avoid these problems, hiring a high quality website development company can be a critical factor in your website’s success.
Are Google’s recommendations on page load speeds unreasonable or unrealistic?
The recommended page load time by Google on both desktop and mobile devices is less than three seconds (<3 sec). However, an analysis of page speed statistics by Backlinko indicates that the average visual complete speed on desktop devices is 8.225 seconds and 21.608 seconds on mobile devices.
Statistics published by Pingdom on the relationship between load time and bounce rate proves the <s seconds benchmark set by the search engine giant. The publication reports a 9% bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds. A 38% bounce rate for pages loads within 5 seconds. And a 59% bounce rate for pages loading within 8 seconds.
Causes of slow page loading speeds
If your revenue as an individual or enterprise significantly comes from the interactions you have with visitors to your websites. Then slow loading pages can be translated into bad business for you as many of your visitors are likely not interacting with your content. Some of the top reasons as to why your site is sluggishly loading include:
- Unclean code caused by factors such as excessive white spaces, unnecessary comments, and inline styling
- JavaScript issues resulting from incorrectly implemented plugins
- A large volume of unoptimized images that consume a lot of bandwidth while loading
- Too much flash content, which is bulky in size hence slowing down your page’s load time
- Poor caching techniques
- Overwhelming HTTP requests that the user’s browser perform to load files on your pages
- To many adds that result in additional HTTP requests
- Poor hosting from your web hosting services provider
Technical page performance is critical in delivering a good page speed
In as much as the <3 seconds, load time might not be an achievable goal for specific pages in reality. Excellent technical page performance can let you power through page load speeds related issues with relative equanimity. By optimizing technical page performance over time, you flatten the speed curve while at the same time delivering a good user experience. Consequently, in as much as your page might fail to beat the 3 seconds benchmark, you will at least be way below speeds that overstretch your visitor’s patience.
