The first website ever launched on the web was in 1991 and since then, 30 years later, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of active websites. To get an idea of how much the internet has grown in the last 30 years, there were over 195,000 active websites in 2021! A steep rise from about 3,000 by the end of 1994, three years after the first website was launched.

From 1991 to 2021, over 1.8 billion websites have been launched, according to a report from Statista, which is simply insane to think about. With stats like these, it is easy to see how valuable websites are in today’s world. There are websites for about any topic of interest you can imagine. Visit https://www.statista.com/ to see the report.

Today, most companies and businesses have a website. It is so important because, with it, businesses can gain access to customers far beyond their geographical locations. Most e-commerce sites, for example, allow customers to shop online from anywhere in the world and have the purchased products shipped to their desired location.

Aside from gaining access to potential customers from around the world, businesses can put up important pieces of information about their brand, products, and/or services. What this means is that a user could simply get all the information they need about a business without needing to place a call through or visit its physical location. There are many benefits that we now enjoy from the existence of websites, but one notable benefit is certainly the convenience it provides to both businesses and customers.

Technicalities of Websites

As we have already established, there are many active websites today and it appears as if new ones are being launched every day. While this is a good thing for consumers, it certainly is not for most companies and business owners.

The internet has empowered a lot of people, exposing businesses to new markets that they otherwise would have struggled to reach or never reached. But the thing is that it is the best websites that often get the largest market share. But businesses and companies are not the only ones affected here, even bloggers feel the heat too.

Now, what do we mean by the best website? By this, we simply mean the most optimized website and this optimization covers different areas. When a website is properly optimized, the following qualities will be present:

• Quick site speed
• Great user experience (web and mobile)
• Aesthetically pleasing
• Clear calls to action

However, we will one be discussing one of the above in this article.

Quick Site Speed

Humans have become a lot more conscious of their time and how they spend it. Studies have also shown that over the years, our attention span has been declining. Now, why should a website owner be concerned about these two facts? Well, it’s also been found that people are more likely to leave your site if pages load slowly. In fact, the statistics behind this single observation are mind-boggling:

• About 47% of people do not wait more than two seconds for a web page to load.
• For e-commerce sites, a one-second delay leads to a 7% reduction in conversion.
• 70% of users that find a site’s speed low will most likely never come back.
• Almost 50% of users will tell others about their bad experience with a website with poor load speed.
• Per Google’s research, as the time it takes for a page to load increases from 1 to 7 seconds, the probability of bounce rate increases by 113%.

These are some of the striking statistics that tell site owners why they should always work on their site’s load time. There is no magic to it. For many users, their experience navigating a site is largely influenced by how fast pages load. We should also mention that a site’s speed directly affects its search ranking, especially on Google. As a matter of factor, Google confessed to using site speed to rank websites in search results. This is because they want the internet to be as fast as possible and easily accessible. Click here to learn more.

This means that when working on your site’s SEO, page load time should be given some priority too. Now that we know just how important this is, let us go over some of the factors that affect site speed.

Factors that Affect Website Speed

There are several factors that can be responsible for a website’s speed. However, we will only consider a few of them.

Page Weight

To put this in simple terms, the content of a page often determines how fast that page loads. Pages that have heavy CSS files, high-quality images, and videos, typically take longer to load.

Render-Blocking JavaScript

JavaScript is the code that is responsible for a site’s responsiveness and functionality. Without it, a site would be uninteresting to users, and they would most probably leave immediately. But if left unoptimized, JavaScript can delay page load time in users’ browsers.

Not Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Page load time varies from one geographical location to another because of the location of servers. Users that are closer to your site’s server will experience quicker site speeds than those that are farther away from it. But by using a CDN, you can significantly reduce page load time.

How to Improve Website Speed

There are many ways by which a website’s speed can be improved. However, most of these methods require some knowledge of coding which most website owners do not have. That said, there are certain tools that can be plugged into a site to optimize its speed. Some work better than others and their performance could also be affected by the site’s host.

Usually, these tools do not require any coding skills to install and set up which makes them really ideal for non-programmers. Instructions are easy to understand and follow and with the right tool, you could improve your site’s speed in no time. Visit https://iwebsitez.com/blog/nitropack-review/ to learn more.

Final Thoughts

One reason you must work on your site’s speed is that users sometimes have hundreds of other options. Your users will not hesitate to leave you for your competition, so, you must do everything possible to keep them on your website for as long as possible.

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