A variable that many marketers underestimate in the digital world — the speed of their website. An issue that isn’t necessarily viewed as a priority, but consequently a contributing factor to bounce rates, which in turn affects page views and consequently conversions with every second waiting for a page to load, leading to a 7% loss of revenue.

However, it is worth noting, that website speed will not only affect traffic to your site and potential conversions, but it will also impact your Google ranking, as Google’s algorithm will simply not rate your website highly if you have a rather slow website loading speed.

Google tracks the speed of your website through search results placed through their search engine. They also take this a step further through their popular Internet browser Google chrome. When Google Chrome was developed, Google engineers developed an integrated tool that measures the page load speed of websites you visit, and sending the information to Google every time you visit the page using Chrome.

The more obvious examples of website speed affecting your business, is in regards to e-commerce websites, like Amazon, who lose 1% of sales for every 100ms it takes their site to load. A great example of putting this into action, was when Shopzilla reduced their website loading time from 7 seconds to 2, boosting pageviews by 25% and leading to a 9.5% increase in revenue.

With an increase in traffic to websites coming from mobile devices, speed is an increasingly important factor to contribute into the successful user experience of your website. Most mobile devices will experience connectivity issues, especially when not connected to wifi. Prompting the user to be patient and wait for the page to load, or losing tolerance and consequently leaving with 85% of mobile users expecting pages to load as fast or faster than they load on the desktop.

After reading this, you might be slightly concerned if your website fits into the ‘slow website loading category’. Don’t sweat. There are various free tools you can use to measure this, in particular Google’s PageSpeed insight tool, which analyses your website speed across a variety of devices.