It’s a cliché to say we live in an age of impatience, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Internet users expect that the information they want will be delivered to them immediately, and research shows that they won’t wait around — bounce rates are proportional to page load times. The slower a page loads, the more users will click the back button and return to their search engine to choose the next link in the list, which is likely to be a competitor.
Google, in its effort to direct its users to the sites most likely to satisfy them, uses page load times as one of its signals for determining ranking. All else being equal, you could be losing ranking to a competitor because your site loads less swiftly.
There are various strategies site owners can implement to make sure that their users get the pages they want as quickly as possible, and we’re going to have a look at some of the most important ones here. Continue reading