How Page Speed Affects User Experience

Affect on user experience

Page speed is one of the most critical factors that affects user experience as users expect websites to load immediately so they can quickly interact with it. If a page takes too long to load there is a strong chance they move to other websites instead of waiting for the page to load. It affects user experience in many ways some of them are:

Initial Impression:

First impressions are initial opinions formed by people when they meet for the first time and are mostly based on immediate and limited observation about characteristics of look and feel.

In the context of page speed and user experience, first impressions are as crucial as in the case of relationships between people. As you now understand the importance of first impressions you can easily understand its importance in page speed. Page speed is the first impression that a user forms for your website.

Bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave the page without viewing the page, making a purchase, or filling out a form. It is used to check the effectiveness of a page in creating interest for users to engage in the page. 

It is calculated by counting the number of single-page visits and dividing that by the total visits. It is then represented as a percentage of total visits. A high bounce rate means the page is unable to engage users. Some important factors that affect bounce rate include bad design of the page or low-quality content.

Page speed is very important for bounce rate as we mostly do not wait for a page that takes longer to load. We normally move to alternative faster options available on the internet.

Engagement:

User engagement is time spent on a website, number of pages visited, and action taken on websites which shows user satisfaction. High engagement shows the user finds content relevant and valuable to them and leads users to conversion.

Page speed is important for user engagement as it is common for users to stay on a website longer if it loads faster and responds quickly to our interactions. We all like websites that are faster to go from one page to another. Also, many studies show even a single-second delay in page speed decreases a huge number of regular users.

Website Conversion rate:

Conversion occurs when a website user completes a desired action on our website. It is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of users and then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. A high conversion rate generally means you are successfully attracting users to take action on your website.

Optimising page speed is a major factor in increasing conversion rates, I think an example works best to explain this: Imagine you want to buy your favorite food item, and the page for the order is not loading …

Ranking:

When a user searches through a search engine, the search engine goes through its index for highly relevant content and then shows that content in order of relevance to the user, this order is called ranking.

When showing results a website at a higher rank means the search engine believes it is more relevant to the search query. There are various ranking factors for search engines such as page performance, content quality, keywords, internal links, back-links, domain authority, technical SEO, engagement metrics, mobile friendliness, social signals, and content authors to name a few.

Among them, page performance is very important. Its importance is so distinguished that the Google search engine uses a set of metrics called “Core Web Vitals” to determine page performance in terms of speed and responsiveness.

Mobile User Experience:

Mobile users are increasing day by day. According to research over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, above 90% of internet users access the internet from mobile phones and there are more than 4 billion active mobile internet users. For this huge volume of mobile users, no one wants to lose the traffic and sales that businesses can potentially make.

Page speed is the deciding factor for mobile users to go to a specific website. If a page is not loaded faster the user decides to go to an alternative page.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed is “the time required for a requested page to load fully in the browser”. It is measured by a multi-stage process which includes:

– Time to First Byte (TTFB): Time required for the page to start loading.
– First Contentful Paint (FCP): Time required for the user to see the first element of a page.
– First Input Delay (FID): Time required for a page to respond to a user input.
– Onload Time: Time required to fully load the contents of a page.

Factors Affecting page Speed

It is better to understand how you can optimise your website’s speed, but if you’re not into this kind of technical work, it is always better to avail Technical SEO services from an expert SEO consultant. While there could be many factors that could affect page speed. Some important factors include:

Server Response Time:

It is “the time server takes to respond to a request”. Various factors affect response time such as server performance, traffic load, and hosting type.

Browser Caching:

Browsers store certain data locally on users’ computers which is called caching. Proper caching increases page speed for returning visitors.

Code Optimization:

As all web pages are made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, efficient code increases the page speed by minimizing the data required to download and process by the browser.

Code Minification & Compression:

Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files and compressing them to reduce size increases page speed.

Files Size:

A smaller number and compact size of files (images, videos) increases page speed.

Location:

Placing page contents (images, videos, code) physically close to users increases page speed. Meaning if your server is located in USA and your user clicks on your website from Europe it would take longer to load in comparison if your server was in Europe itself.