This article was 100% created by a human
Website speed is not measured in seconds; it is measured in conversion rates, SEO rankings, GEO visibility, email marketing engagement, and paid ads cost-per-click.
According to a 2016 Google study, 53% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That stat is from 10 years ago. Nowadays, speed is not only about being fast or slow. When comparing fast and super-fast websites, you see a big gap: the probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.
Fast is not a feeling. Google measures it and uses those results to predict User Experience (UX). Your website is part of your sales funnel, and when its speed is subpar, it affects all areas of your marketing. A slow website has to pay Website Speed Tax; you will have to pay more for CPC on your paid ads, spend more resources on your SEO to rank properly, and send more emails to get the same number of conversions. Website speed is not about shaving milliseconds just for bragging rights. It is about generating leads, driving sales, and managing ad spend.
Real World Website Speed Optimization Success Stories
Below are some well-documented cases of large companies that saw a significant boost in business by optimizing their website speed. But these results are not reserved for huge companies; your small business can benefit from them as well.
- Yelp saw a 15% increase in conversions when FCP, along with other metrics, was improved by 45%. FCP, or First Contentful Paint, refers to any first piece of content that is shown on your screen.
- Vodafone welcomed a 8% sales boost when LCP was improved by 31%. LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, refers to the largest element of a webpage, like the main image on your homepage.
- AliExpress saw 10.5% increase in orders placed when load time was reduced by 36%.
- Ancestry increased its conversions by 7% when load time improved by 64%.
- Staples improved their conversion rate by 10% when load time was reduced by 1 sec.
Improved website speed, on any scale, means fewer abandoned carts, more lead forms filled, less waste on paid ads spend, better first impression of your brand, and more.
What Good Website Speed Looks Like, and How to Measure It
The best place to get a good assessment of your website speed is PageSpeed Insights. This free Google tool analyzes your website performance on both mobile and desktop versions. The score it provides ranges from 0 to 100: a green score above 90 is considered good, an orange score between 50 and 89 indicates room for improvement, and a score below 50 is considered poor.
Below the score, you can see the areas that Google deems improvements could be made. Suggestions can range from simple, such as properly sized images, to more time-consuming, such as legacy code on your website.
Other ways to check your website speed, and how your page is performing are:
- Search Console Core Web Vitals
- Google Analytics (GA4) landing-page conversion rate
- Check your ad landing pages that are not performing well, especially if they have a high bounce, low engagement, or a weak conversion rate
While a perfect 100 score is ideal, an orange score around 80 should be enough as long as your core web vitals are not significantly impacting user experience.
However, just because you received a green grade, that does not mean you are set. Speed isn’t just how fast a website loads, but how fast a user can interact with it. Nothing is more frustrating to UX than a page that looks ready but doesn’t respond when clicked. Lastly, there’s the psychology of perceived speed.
Perhaps your website has a video as the background of the main section on your homepage. When you test it through Google PageSpeed Insights, you get a good grade, because your web developer set a grey background behind the video. Google saw that loading instantly, since it’s just CSS, and gave you a green grade. But users will perceive your website as slow since they see it loading, which will negatively impact UX.
What Does Website Speed Affect in Digital Marketing?
The answer is simple: everything. From how well your website converts, to your SEO rankings & GEO visibility, your cost-per-click (CPC) on paid ads campaigns, and the conversion rate of your emails, it all is influenced by speed. Loading speed may very well be the #1 success factor for all your marketing campaigns. Does it matter how stylish your designs are, how witty your copy is, or how big your black Friday discount is if nobody ever sees it? If your audience doesn’t hear your message because you took too long to start talking to them, it is all in vain.
Let’s dig deeper into how slow website speeds affect each of your marketing channels.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
SEO is the optimization of a website to improve visibility and improve its rankings on search engines, like Google and Yahoo. GEO is similar to SEO but for AI, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
SEO is composed of three main parts, and one of them is technical SEO, where speed lies. You can draft the most interesting blog your audience will love! The content is timely, the headline is interesting, and the artwork is captivating. However, if it takes forever to load, almost no one will wait to read it. Google will know its content, but after trying to send multiple users to your page and most of them bouncing, it will decrease your visibility because the experience was not positive. Even if your SEO content is great, nobody is going to wait 20 seconds for it to load. Great content on a frustrating website is a frustrating experience, and frustrating experiences do not rank well.
For GEO, the issue may not be as prominent as for SEO, since crawling bots don’t wait like humans do. But if the page loads slowly, crawlers can time out due to a limited crawling budget, leaving parts of your website uncrawled. Besides that, GEO is all about giving the most reliable, clear, and confident source. A slow website may be perceived as less reliable, outdated, and poorly maintained, which will decrease the AI model’s confidence in it.
A fast and well-maintained website is easier to crawl, render, and it builds trust as part of a positive site experience. If the AI can’t digest your site quickly, it may not recommend you as a source in its answers. In the age of AI, speed is your ally.
Email Marketing
The reason a fast website is important for email marketing is simple: the email itself is rarely the last step in your funnel. Your eCommerce store can’t sell a product via email, and you can’t capture a lead form there either. The email is there to send a message, but an action is required: click the email, land on a web page, and perform that action.
If that landing page is underperforming, it does not matter if the email itself has high open and click rates; the desired action, such as making a purchase or contacting your business, may never occur.
Paid Ads
In search engine paid ads, the cost per click (CPC) is probably the most important number for many experts while evaluating their campaigns. The amount you pay per click is determined by your bid, the competition in that auction, and the ad quality score. The quality of your ad is determined by the expected click-through rate (CTR), the ad’s relevance to the search query, and the landing page experience. If a landing page takes a long time to load after the user clicks on that ad, a lot of them will bounce before it even fully loads. That tells Google that the user did not convert, did not navigate to other pages, did not scroll down the content; the landing page experience was not great. In turn, you will have to bid higher to compensate for all those users who did not even engage with your page because your website took too long to load.
A slow landing page does not just hurt conversions after the click; it also hurts them before the click. It can make every click more expensive. Google stated that “If your ads are low quality, you may find that your actual CPC is close to your maximum CPC even when there is low competition for the search terms that triggered your ad.” We have to remember that Google is serving these ads to its customers, who are people searching on Google. So, for your subpar website to be shown, you will have to pay much more.
The False Sense of Speed
Here at Cravo Marketing, we come across many business owners who say their website is fast and that they just tested it. However, these tests are not conducted in a real-world setting. A lot of business owners check their website on their desktops, with their wired, 1G/second internet speeds, already cached website. And if it doesn’t load fast, they blame their internet speed and try again. However, almost always, that is not the setup that your audience will interact with your website.
Since October 2016, most people worldwide have interacted online on mobile devices rather than desktops. In the United States, since many people browse the internet at work on desktops, that date is a little later, in 2021.
But the point is that website speed is key because people’s internet is not ideal. You want your website to load fast for everyone, including the person taking the subway, at a coffee shop, or stuck in a traffic jam. A lot of customers surf the internet at 4G or even 3G speeds in their cars or inside office buildings. Website speeds shouldn’t be tested only on a wired desktop, but also on a mid-tier mobile device with a throttled connection.
Get a Free Audit
We at Cravo Marketing love speed! We love it so much, we want your website to be fast. And we want that speed because it does make a difference. Google’s Milliseconds Make Millions study, based on 37 brands and 30 million sessions, found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed increased retail conversions by 8.4% and led retail consumers to spend 9.2% more.
To help you achieve higher revenues, more leads, and more sales, we offer a full Website Speed Audit, free of charge, no strings attached. We will check your website’s loading time and make impactful suggestions, all free of charge. If you want, we can step in and make those fixes for you. Just reach out.
At Cravo, fast performance is not an afterthought. It is part of how we build websites that convert.
