User experience affects your SEO, paid search, and paid social channels, which is why site speed is so important. 

SEO

Given a large proportion of internet users browse on mobile devices, optimising for mobile has never been more important. Following updates to Google's ranking algorithm, specifically the Speed Update back in July 2018 and the more recent Page Experience Update that began rolling out in August 2021, mobile page speed is now a contributing ranking factor. 

What does this mean for SEO? Well, if your competitors' sites are outperforming yours in terms of page speed and are serving users with content quicker than you are, this will be taken into consideration for ranking purposes. Not only that, page speed is critical in preventing a high bounce rate and improving your conversions, so ensuring your pages load in under 2 seconds should be a priority.

Paid Search

Google wants to have a great reputation for linking users through to highly relevant products/services they’ve searched for and deliver the most seamless user experience once on site too. Which means rewarding brands with higher quality scores for those that can achieve a great landing page experience and faster site speed - and with that comes lower costs per click for those brands! 

Why pay more per click, waste advertising budgets AND then deliver a poor user experience once they land on your site? To put into perspective, for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%.

Paid Social

Just like paid ads on Google, Facebook is also in favour of quicker site speed when prioritising your ads. Facebook tries to display the best results to suit a user's interests.

As we mentioned above, faster site speed simply means a better user experience. Facebook announced previously that ads would now either be prioritised, or not, based on speed and user experience. There are many factors that come into play for Facebook’s algorithm with social ads, but a fast load time will give your ad a higher priority on the newsfeed, while slow load times will cause your ad to be demoted or even ignored.  Can you afford for this to be happening?

What's your next move?

Now that you know how important site speed is to your website, from affecting digital channels, to effectively having a direct impact on your conversions, talk to us here at Techquity.

Let's take a look at what improvements you can make to maximise your digital marketing activity >> talk@techquity.co.uk