Slow Page Load Speed Directly Impacts Your Website Conversions

A customer’s experience with you is everything. Just as you focus on providing effective pest control solutions and personable service to develop positive customer relationships, Google does the same. Sifting through millions of websites and presenting top-quality options is their service.

The online user experience is key to a successful Website. Page load speed plays a critical role in that experience.

How Page Load Speed Affects User Behavior

We are an increasingly demanding society, which is demonstrated by the small timeframe users allot a desktop or mobile webpage to load. Below are some statistics that show a visitor's likelihood to "bounce", which means leave your Website without viewing any other pages or clicking any buttons.

As a page load time (in seconds) goes from:

• 1s to 3s, the probability of bounce increases by 32%
• 1s to 5s, the probability of bounce increases by 90%
• 1s to 6s, the probability of bounce increases by 106%
• 1s to 10s, the probability of bounce increases by 123%
  

Google’s ranking algorithm incorporated page load speed in 2010 on desktops and 2018 on mobile. As of June 16, 2021, Google is in the process of rolling out their Page Experience Update, which will be completed by the end of August 2021. This Google Search update includes page loading speed, focusing in on when the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) loads. LCP is one of three qualifications making up the new Core Web Vitals report (CWV). If a URL’s CWV report has a “Poor” or “Needs Improvement” status, that is considered Failed criteria under Google Search’s ranking algorithm.

The idea behind all these ranking updates is Google wants to provide every online user with the fastest online experience. Similar to you not offering a particularly hazardous pesticide or not recommending certain types of pest control methods you know will leave customers with reoccurring pest problems, Google will leave you behind in search rankings if your website is too slow.

What is Defined as “Slow” for Page Load Speeds?

According to Google, a page that is “very slow” takes longer than 10 seconds to fully load, but Google Search actually prefers a Website to load in under 3 seconds to be considered “quick.”

With the active rollout of the CWV report, you now must consider Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) as a factor. LCP is a user-friendly metric for measuring loading performance and is marked at the point when a page’s main content has loaded.

To find out how your pest control website measures up, Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that can provide you with metrics as well as suggestions for how to lower your page load time. Speaking of…