Load Speed: Why Your SEO Specialist in Brunei Should Also Know Web Design

Forty-seven percent of users who visit your site expect your page to load in under two seconds, and 57percent of them will leave if it takes three seconds or more. That’s according to the interesting facts gathered and published by Aykira. This means that the time it takes your website to load could have a huge impact on your business. Moreover, it (among many other factors) could affect your site’s ranking in Google. Therefore, the SEO specialist handling your business website in Brunei should be concerned in more than just finding keywords.

How Can Load Time Affect Your Ratings?

Finding the right keywords and putting them in all the right places is certainly important when you’re creating pages for your site. This is one of the ways that the Googlebot will determine how relevant your website it is in relation to a search made. But even if you occupy the top spot in the Google search results page, and thousands of people do click on your link and visit your site, they will go away just as fast if it doesn’t load instantly. And instantly means 100 milliseconds or less.   Worse, people who find your site too slow are less likely to come back.

Photo courtesy of acercamealli.blogspot.com

Now, since user experience is one of the factors that affect your rankings, you are likely to lose your top spot if you don’t satisfy your visitors. The search engine can determine the “long click” factor, which is to say, if the visitor doesn’t go back to search immediately after they clicked your link, then they’re probably happy. If they do go back right away, then it’s likely that they weren’t satisfied with what they found on your site – or it could be that they got tired of waiting for it to load. After all, four seconds, for an Internet user, is a very long time to wait.

Factors That Affect Load Time

While there are many uncontrollable factors that affect load time, such as the network speed of the Internet user or the specs of their device, there are also causes that come from your end. These include:

• Too many large images. Large, high-resolution pictures take time to load, and the more there are on a page, the longer it will take to get them all displayed.
• Too many items cramped into the page. Videos that automatically play on the sidebar, special effects, plug-ins, widgets, ads – these gobble up bandwidth, and if you have so many of them on a page, then your visitors will be gone even before the first half of your page appears.
• Embedded media. Real-time feeds, slide shows, live radio, and other media that are hosted by another site can slow down your loading time.
• Inefficient hosting service. There are many Web hosting companies out there, and a number of them provide services at very low cost. While this can be beneficial for your company, you should also consider your possible losses if thousands of potential customers turn away just because of slow load time.
• Inadequate design. Considering the increasing number of mobile device users, your website should be able to load fast regardless of what kind of machine your visitors are using.

There are more technical factors involved which you and your Web specialist should consider. But the bottom line is, you need to have a website that will satisfy your target market, including sufficient speed.