The New Criteria for Better Webpage Experience: Grow Page Speed in 2021

For a website to be an effective marketing tool, it has to meet specific factors first, like the beauty of its design, its responsiveness, and its page speed. 

These factors have become massive indicators of a users’ whole experience. If your website has low performance on these factors, the user may not have a great experience on your website, leading them to click away.

Now Google has issued another website indicator, page speed. But what exactly do you mean by this?

What is page speed?

It can be simply defined as the amount of time it takes for a webpage to display all of its content or the time it takes for your browser to receive a server’s initial information.

Page elements such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and many more can drastically affect the loading speed of pages. Even the webserver can affect it.

But take note that site speed is very different from your web pages’ speed. While it focuses on a user’s time before he can interact with a single page, site speed is the average of some pages in your website,

 It is also measured separately from mobile phones and desktops or laptops. That is because they are very different technologies, so the user experience will also be different.

Why page speed matter?

For any business owner, it can positively affect a customer’s overall experience when they visit your business website. 

Kissmetrics infographics show that if your web page takes more than 3 seconds to load, a user will most likely click away from that page. This indicates that people do not have the patience when it comes to loading time.

But more importantly, Google has become stricter when it comes to a webpage’s speed. In 2010 it became one of the ranking factors in Google’s search index. 

In 2017, they considered a webpage’s speed as one of the factors for mobile site rankings.

And more recently, they introduced page experience in their ranking signal. This new signal aims to figure out the quality of user experience in web pages. 

This means Google has expanded its criteria with specific factors that certainly affect a person’s overall browsing experience.

So why is it that you must appeal to Google’s demand? They are the biggest search engine on the internet, and if you do not follow them, your website may not show in their search engine results.

Some factors that can affect your page speed

Because statistics have shown how a webpage’s speed can affect a user’s overall site experience, here are some factors that may be causing your pages to slow down.

• Heavy image page – pages with high DPI or responsive images can relatively slow down a webpage. 
• Downloadable files – too many downloadable files can affect a webpage’s speed.
• JavaScript scripts – too many JavaScript scripts can also slow a page down.
• Unused code – unused codes can add to a page’s memory use and thus slowing it down.

When it comes to digital marketing, you need to be updated on the latest trends and criteria, especially Google announcements. 

And since Google says web pages that can load content faster and quicker are more likely to satisfy customers than those that are not, it is best to improve your web pages.

 If you don’t, your website might lose organic traffic, leading to a decline of potential customers.