For the last few years, people have been discussing a lot about website loading time and people are also trying hard to improve upon the loading speed of their website. People realized that the page loading speed can influence your ranking on the search page and generally Facebook will try to push instant articles.
Therefore, obviously, people are more concerned about their website’s loading time. Now the question is how fast will be fast enough? People want to know how much loading time that any consumer will accept.
What is page speed?
The amount of time taken by any website page to load is the page speed. This is determined by many different factors like:
- Site’s server
- Size of page file
- Image compression.
According to an expert of SEO Sydney, page speed may not be as simple as it may sound. Actually, there are several ways to measure page speed. The following are the 3 most common ways to measure page speed.
- Fully loaded page
How much time the webpage takes to load 100% of all the resources available on a page. This is the most common way to determine the speed of loading a page.
- Time to first byte
By measuring how much time the page takes to start the process of loading is also another way to measure.
- First meaningful paint or first contextual paint
The amount of time a website will take to load enough of all its resources for any user to read the entire content available on that page.
Now let us say that you have a certain blog post that is taking 10 seconds to load fully. That will be considered a long time particularly if you are waiting for the complete page to load. Paying attention to its first meaningful paint often represents better how any user will actually interact with the page as it will load.
Let us look once again at your webpage that is taking 10 seconds to entirely load all the resources of the page. While the entire page takes just 10 seconds for loading, but the user gets to see a “First Meaningful Paint” within 1.5 seconds.
Why the time for page loading is so important for SEO?
Before we get into the page loading speeds that you are aiming there is something that you should know about the numbers on your page speed. Often, these stats are posted and are dated however, technology is continually improving.
The following standards are made about the speed of webpage:
- In case, your site loads within five seconds, then it is faster than almost 25% of the web
- If your site loads within 2.9 seconds, then it is faster than almost 50% of the web
- In case your site loads within 1.7 seconds, then it is faster than about 75% of the web
- If your site loads within 0.8 seconds, then it is faster than about 94% of the web.
The most recent and interesting study was made by the department of Financial Times Technology. They have tried to look at how page speed had affected their development of publishing sites.
They performed a study that involved their specific objectives for a certain publishing site and they had a certain test group and control. Their test group had a five-second delay that was added to each of the page loading times. The following are the notable facts that they found.
- The first-second delay had resulted in an almost 4.9% drop in their article numbers that any visitor could read
- Then 3 seconds delay caused a drop of 7.9%.
- When delays occurred then visitors read less
It is highly recommended that one should be able to completely read the article, then it can bring up a point, which most of us may already know that most visitors tend to do less on those sites when the load times of the page delays their interactions and makes the website less desirable.
Final word
Summing it all, your speed of website page loading needs to be quick enough so that you can get most of the information on the page without making any compromise on the customer experience.
As far as Google is concerned, the desired speed will be almost a blink, and your website must open at the speed of your breath.