User experience
Why would Google be very particular about the website’s loading time? Simple. It affects overall user experience. And since Google invests on user experience to boost its popularity, websites that take a while to load don’t usually get the top spot in the search results.
A lot of users usually can’t wait for a page that takes a few seconds to load. Given the highly competitive nature of today’s industries, having a slow website can make people leave your site, and therefore you wasted the chance of convincing them to buy your products, or avail of your services.
In fact, according to studies, 1 microsecond is equivalent to around 1% decline in sales. Just to give you an idea why it is crucial for your site to load faster these days, let’s compare how online users behave during the late 90s and around 10 years ago.
In 1999, 66% of online users are already satisfied when the page loads within 8 seconds. By 2006, 33% of website visitors already leave the website if a site fails to load more than 4 seconds.
How fast is fast? If your website takes around 5 seconds to load, it is only faster than 25% of the rest of the websites online. By improving your loading time to 1.7 seconds, this already puts you ahead of 75% of other websites found on the World Wide Web.
