The Need For Speed. That is Website Speed.

No, we shouldn't have the need for speed while behind the wheel of our car. Speed however should be a concern for your website. It is a factored in the search algorithm and it is a search engine optimization (SEO) factor that you can do something about. Google offers tools for testing and gives you recommendations on how to address the issues. I’m a big believer in doing your best to make your website show quickly to the user.

Read this article this article “Google Claims Core Web Vitals Saved Over 10,000 Years In Load Times” on Search Engine Journal. Core Web vitals are 4 areas of metrics that are measured by actual user data for a site. Though your site needs to get enough traffic to have this data available to you. Now the biggest thing that sticks out to me in the article is that there are still over half the sites out there that do not meet the thresholds for Core Web Vitals.

Google has been pushing web speeds even before their Core Web Vitals that they introduced in 2020. They’ve had page speed testing tools for years. They introduced their PageSpeed Tools in 2010. So should we really be lacking in website load times? Everyone should be testing their sites with Googles PageSpeed Insights tool. It’s free, so there is really no excuse to not use it.

Why does page speed matter? Easy answer is people don’t like waiting. Just watch people as they browse the Internet and you’ll see it pretty clearly. In general people are impatient, I mean do you like waiting in line at a store to check out? I’m guessing not. It is probably one of the reasons we are seeing self checkouts on the rise. In general faster pages are seen as more efficient and give a better user experience. There is a 3 second rule. No, not the one that you drop something on the floor you are eating and if you get it quick enough it is still okay to eat. It states something like if your site doesn’t load within 3 seconds people will start to stop waiting and move on to another site. I’m actually seeing people saying more like a 2 second rule, Basically, the faster the better.

Let’s get our need for speed by fixing those websites. There are plenty of them out there that need some tender loving care. Then when you are building websites start keeping page speed in mind.