And with so many sites at their fingertips, today's online shoppers don't have to suffer through slow websites.
If one of your pages doesn't look fast, your customer will move on to faster online stores, and instead of converting those clicks into sales, you've delivered a poor customer experience.
In fact, a one-second delay in page load time has been shown to result in a 7% loss in conversion and 11% fewer page views.
For an online store that makes $50,000 a day, that one-second delay adds up to more than $1 million in lost sales each year.
So yes, the loading speed of a web page is of utmost importance and in this article we will teach you why.
What is loading speed?
Page load speed is the average time it takes for a page to appear on the screen.
It is calculated from initiation (when a page link is clicked or a web address is typed) to completion (when the page is fully loaded in the browser).
Usually measured in seconds, page load time is made up of two different parts:
Network and Server Time: Based on how fast your internet connection is and how quickly static assets like photos and other files are served.
Browser Time: How long it takes the browser to parse and execute the document and render the page so it is available for user interaction.
The same web page may have different page load times in different browsers (e.g., Safari vs. Internet Explorer), on different platforms (e.g., mobile vs. desktop), and in different locations.
If your site is fulfilled by a data center in the United States but sells to customers in Australia and the United Kingdom, for example, international shoppers will likely experience much longer load times.
But if your site's static assets are copied to different data centers around the world, the page will be pulled from the data center closest to where your buyers are.
This can dramatically speed up page load times.
Different pages on the same site can also have radically different loading speeds, due to developer decisions like richer design elements, more robust functionality, and more content on a page.
There are several online tools to determine average page load time, which means the web development team may want to focus on optimizing the slowest loading pages first.