If you have ever visited a website that was slow to load, then you can attest first-hand to how frustrating that can be. And, suffice to say, your site visitors feel the exact same way when your WordPress website loads slow for them.
The truth is, most site visitors are extremely unforgiving when it comes to websites that take more than 2 seconds to load. To add to that, 79% of consumers say that poor web performance is enough to cause them to never want to return to make another purchase!
In fact, loading time is thought to be one of the biggest contributors to webpage abandonment.
As seen in the image below, according to a recent State of the Online Retail Performance Report by Akamai, the quicker your website pages load, the longer your site visitors will stay on your website (and thus the lower your site’s bounce rate will be).
If your website is performing at less than stellar speeds, these statistics should alarm you immediately. And if it doesn’t, keep reading.
Today we are going to examine some of the most important reasons WordPress speed is so crucial to your success as a website owner.
Search Rankings
Google first made website speed an official ranking signal back in 2010, and it has only increased in importance since then. This means that a slow website speed has the potential to negatively influence your SEO and thus your search engine rankings.