3 Excellent Reasons Why Performance Matters

I’ve written this article, “3 Excellent Reasons Why Performance Matters”, because there is a fundamental flaw in many of today’s websites.  This is what I call ‘Pretty versus Performance’.  Everyone wants a website that looks pretty but if pretty is not done right, performance suffers badly. Load speed drops off and with it, your audience. It’s a balance but if done correctly, can pay off big time.

Here’s an example –
You’ve spent your hard earned cash to build a website and present yourself to the world on the web. You type your new website address (url) into your browser search bar and up comes your website with all of its sliders, pictures, widgets and things. Fantastic you think, I’ve arrived.

Well… You know how to find your website, Your browser knows how to find your website  – but what about the rest of the world? For everyone else to find you, Google, Bing and the other search engines used by web users everywhere need to find your site so they can present you to the world.

Try typing your industry sector into your search engine of choice. What! Wait a minute! How many hairdressers, bakeries, gift shops (or whichever industry you typed) are there in the world??? How will anyone ever find my site???

And that is:

Excellent Reason #1 for requiring High Performing Websites.

I will use Google throughout this article as it is by far the most used. (approx 94% of users in Australia search with Google – https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share).

Google uses what it calls signals to allocate a search ranking to your site and there are many of these signals. We are not told what they are and Google is probably tweaking them all the time. However, straight from Google’s own site, Google Search Central – Ensure that…

the page provides a good user experience, focusing on the aspects of loading, interactivity, and visual stability:

To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have  LCP (largest contentful paint) occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.

Well, what does this indicate? Google wants to reward good user experience. If your website is a highly performing site i.e. it loads in the browser very fast, then your search engine ranking will be much better than if your site is slow (read normal). And your intended audience will find you!

This should be reason enough to shop for a high performance website.

Excellent Reason #2 for requiring Websites that Perform.

Page bounce. The attention span of today’s web users is extremely short. Just how short is debatable but with the amount of information freely available on the web, the next page is just a tap or click away.

If your site loads slowly, you can bet many searchers will not wait or spend long with you. Some of their attention span has already been taken with the load time.

Excellent Reason #3 for requiring the Fastest Websites.

Not everyone writes great content. Not every site is setup to include great content.

However, Google uses the quality of site content as a signal which will effect your search engine ranking. What to do? Well, all of the content on your site needs to well written and follow the 10 basic rules of good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). And if there is not a lot of content, load it as fast as possible to increase your ranking scores.