FOCUS OREGON - V1 Issue 3

The Need for
Website Speed
The Need for Speed
Perhaps the most important of the ranking factors is your “page loading speed.” If your
site doesn’t load and become interactive within about 2 seconds, your potential clients will
simply move on to the next website - of your competitor. No one really knows how those
200+ factors I mentioned are weighted but there are two very specific reasons that the search
engines have “a need for speed.”
The first reason is our ever-decreasing attention span. There are many studies such as those
listed in Google’s article at https://blueskydigit.al/performance that have demonstrated that
a website that loads slowly will lose potential visitors. We are all simply too impatient to wait.
The second reason driving the need for speed is that mobile is quickly overtaking desktop
in usage (actually, it already has) and the users in developing markets are simply skipping
desktops altogether to access the Internet. Data is still relatively expensive, especially in
developing markets, so Google is stressing “mobile first indexing” to encourage a faster
Internet. Now, you may think that doesn’t apply to your potential clients, but they are using
smartphones, too. If your site takes longer to load, they will move on. So will Google in
ranking your site.
Visitor Loss vs. Load Time
Despite everything you have probably heard about Google, the Googlers do everything in
their considerable power to help you out. They provide a lot of tools to help diagnose potential
problems with our websites (so does Bing). The first one gives you an estimate of visitor loss
based on your site’s loading time. The first set of data I’m going to show you (Fig. 1) was
obtained using Google’s https://testmysite.
thinkwithgoogle.com, which is powered
by webpagetest.org. Webpagetest.org is
an open source project that is supported
by Google. The TestMySite tool measures
several things, but for now we’ll just be
looking at the “estimated visitor loss” as
a function of loading time on a 3G mobile
network.
Figure 1. Estimated visitor loss as function of
page loading time for the homepages of the
2018 PPA Board Members’ websites as measured
with https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com.
The first thing you notice about this data is that the visitor loss is not linear at first. You get a
HUGE advantage by having a loading time of less than 5 seconds. Only one board member’s
site loaded in 4 seconds. As with everything Internet, there is a caveat here. Google’s own
tool, TestMySite, measures Google’s own homepage, https://google.com, as loading in 3
seconds over a 3G connection. The estimated visitor loss is “Low,” instead of a percentage.
If you look at Google’s homepage using https://webpagetest.org over a cable connection
(1.5Mbps), we usually get a load time of around 3.4 seconds. However, if we run the same test
using an emulated 3GSlow connection (400 Kbps), Google’s homepage takes just under 15
seconds to load! If we change to the 4G emulator, Google’s homepage loads in just under 4
seconds. Yes, 5G service is coming, but the gist of all this is that your site needs to load fast,
period.
Google is constantly doing research on the conversion rates of landing pages. I highly
recommend that you review their article on mobile benchmarks at https://blueskydigit.al/
mobilebenchmarks for more information. Another good article from Google on 2018’s “Speed
Update” can be found at https://blueskydigit.al/2018SpeedUpdate.
How Can We Measure
Website Performance?
SEO
In coming issues, I’ll fill you in on some of my favorite free tools for measuring the technical
performance of your website(s). These tools give you plenty of great suggestions on how to
improve the performance of your site. Then I’ll also give you some actionable steps you can
take to make your website faster and boost your rankings. If you’re running on WordPress,
I’ll give you my very favorite plugin for compressing your beautiful images without degrading
their quality. I’ll also tell you my favorite WordPress caching plugin.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me an email at kim@blueskydigitalstrategy.
com and put “PPA Technical SEO Question” in the subject line. You can also check out my
blog at https://www.blueskydigitalstrategy.com. We also have a fledgling private Facebook
Group, Blue Sky Digital Strategy (https://www.facebook.com/groups/blueskydigitalstrategy),
where you can ask for help and find lots of good information on all aspects of SEO and Social
Media. And, if you made it this far, I’ll give you a complimentary website audit. Just mention
that you saw it here. PPA members and one site only, please.
Kim Kuhlman, PhD, M.Photog.Cr, CPP is a professional photographer and owner of Kim Kuhlman Photography and
Chile Dog Photography. She earned her PhD in Engineering Physics and worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and the Planetary Science Institute. Imaging of one form or another, most recently at the nano-scale, has been
involved in her scientific endeavors. She brings a knowledge of physics to her photography that gives her a
unique perspective on creating an award-winning image.
Kim is also the owner of Blue Sky Digital Strategy, LLC, a digital agency that helps small businesses with WordPress
website design and security, search engine optimization (SEO), content and email marketing, and social media
management. Blue Sky Digital Strategy also provides WordPress coaching, security and website maintenance
services.
6 • FOCUS OREGON
FALL 2018 FOCUS OREGON • 7