What is Website Site Speed and how does it affect SERPs

Site speed refers to the time taken for a website to load and for a user to be able to interact with it. Your sites speed is determined by the content on your site and is a very important factor to consider when running your site. One of Googles roles is to give the user a pleasant experience, therefore a slow website could affect this experience and in turn Google have gave these sites a backseat.

When a page loads for the user, there are two stages in which show the sites speed. The document complete time and the fully rendered time. The document complete time defines the time taken for a page to load before the user can interact with the site. In other terms, when a site begins to load for the user, it is the time between the start of loading up until the time where a user can interact with the site. The fully rendered time is the time taken for every element of the site to load and be fully functional.

In our fast-paced lifestyles, we naturally have a short attention span when it comes to searching online.  We want results fast and if a site takes too long to load we turn to other sites for a better, quicker experience. It has been found 40% of internet users will more than likely abandon a site if it takes three seconds or more to load. If your site falls out of this expected time, your business could lose an abundance of potential clientele. This shows how page speed can be one factor that determines how many conversions a site gets.

As explained throughout this post; one factor search engines such as Google take into consideration when ranking sites is site speed. It has been found 47% of consumers expect any web page they visit to load in 2 seconds or less. This shows that in order to give users a good experience Google will rank faster loading pages higher in the SERPs.

To conclude, site speed is just one the factors a search engine will consider when ranking your site and should always be considered when building and maintaining a website.