How much time should it take for a website to load? Five seconds? Eight? Those seconds count, and website owners should know how to cut down the numbers to improve experience.
The longer it takes for website to completely load determines users' satisfaction.
While the differences is in seconds or even milliseconds, they could be the difference between keeping visitors on your website, or losing them - just because they couldn't wait.
According to Google on its Google Small Business blog, most websites lose half of their visitors while loading, and 46 percent of people say that the most frustrating thing about browsing on their mobile phone is waiting for slow pages to load.
To help webmasters in speeding up their websites and their sites' web pages, Google has updated its Test My Site with a set of features to test website's speed.
The features are able to show:
- Website's mobile speed: half of people visiting websites expect them to load less than two seconds.
- The number of visitors you may be losing: Time matters. The longer it takes to load, conversion will drop.
- Comparison to the competition: Showing how your website's speed competes with others in the industry.
- Recommendations: A few suggestions to make website faster. Google can also email personalized assessment with the recommendations.
Google's Test My Site was launched in 2016. It continues to give a grade on desktop and mobile site speed performance, but with the update, it adds some nifty features to make things easier for webmasters and web owners.
Taking a few steps to improve site speed can make a big difference. With the update, web owners and webmasters should be able to pinpoint their websites' weaknesses and see what can be done to optimize them.