When companies explore options for increasing revenues, their considerations are typically limited to the more conventional solutions: increased budget on advertisements, more attractive offers, improved sales process. However, page speed is an element that does not get much attention despite influencing all the important metrics: bounce rate, conversion rate, SEO, and return on investment in the end.

All the statistics speak for themselves. The impact of the first five seconds when it comes to conversion is the greatest; bounce rate increases by 32% when page loading goes up from one to three seconds. Seven out of ten customers consider the speed of the webpage to be an influencing factor when it comes to purchases. For instance, Amazon claimed that each 100 ms delay may lead to 1% loss in sales.

Why Page Speed Deserves a Seat at the Revenue Table

Page speed basically refers to how fast a particular website is available for use, meaning how fast it loads as well as how soon the users can interact with the site whether using a laptop or browsing through mobile internet. A site which takes time to load will not only frustrate the users but will also force them to visit other websites which are much faster than yours.

The sites which are heavy in nature such as those with lots of pictures, video and animation are known to be slower in nature compared to lightweight sites which contain mostly texts and load almost instantly. That is why, most business sites find themselves somewhere in the middle, and therefore, that is where optimization comes in.

The Relationship Between Core Web Vitals and SEO Rankings

But the speed of your website matters not only from a user-experience perspective; it also plays an important role in Google’s ranking criteria. These are the most important metrics which are used by Google to measure how well a website performs and provides a great user experience, thus, these Core Web Vitals influence your ranking in the Google search results.

The following are three Core Web Vitals which you have to consider:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – it measures the time taken for the biggest visible content element to load. The LCP threshold is 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID) – it measures the time taken for your website to react to its first interaction from a user. The ideal FID is below 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – it refers to the change in layout during the loading of content. The CLS threshold is 0.1.

The websites which pass these thresholds will rank high, because Google aims at optimizing user happiness.

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

One of the main reasons why problems with LCP arise can be attributed to the following sources: hero image size being too big, slow server response time, and scripts blocking the rendering of the biggest elements. In order to solve LCP problems, you need to first compress and resize images, and then utilize the services of a content delivery network.

How to Reduce First Input Delay (FID)

All problems related to FID arise because of an overload of the browser. Numerous scripts and plug-ins take up space and slow down its work before the user even starts interacting with the page. There is no better way to decrease the FID problem except by minimizing the number of plug-ins, deferring not urgent scripts and splitting long scripts into several pieces.

How to Fix Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Issues

CLS tends to be the most obvious issue even if users don’t realize it’s called CLS: it’s the annoyance of when the page moves just as you’re about to click somewhere on it. Ads tend to be a frequent reason for CLS because the elements contained within an ad will often be resized after they are loaded into the page.

Optimize Images for Faster Website Loading

Large images constitute one of the biggest and easily solvable problems associated with the issue of slow page load speed. It is possible that large and high-quality images make your web page look very nice and good-looking, but you need to be ready to sacrifice the performance of your website. Proper image optimization can help you out here.

Page Speed Optimization for eCommerce Websites

This is particularly true for online stores. Product pages have an inherent tendency to be very visual in terms of their content, and every extra second taken to load means a customer can just drop off your page and buy from somewhere else. Striking the right balance between having visually rich products and maintaining good speed is among the best decisions that any eCommerce brand can make.

Why a Website Performance Audit Matters for ROI

When you’re paying for ads, or even when you are putting effort in attracting visitors through organic traffic, having a slow website silently ruins your efforts. Potential customers leave your site and the efforts made towards bringing them to your site result in very little profits.

A correct audit of your website helps you discover the sources of inefficiency, such as irrelevant plugins, inefficient coding, large images, or problems with mobile speed, and allows you to understand how to eliminate them. This way you stop guessing what slows down your site and make it a quantifiable part of marketing efforts.

Bringing It Together: Speed, User Experience, and Growth

Page speed, CWVs, and conversion rate are all interconnected via the experience of the user. The former ensures better user engagement, better SEO ranking, and more conversions from traffic you’ve paid for already. All this can be done without a costly redesign of your website, just an adequate audit and prioritization.

This is when choosing the best Website Development Company in Dubai is key since they create high-performance websites in advance rather than fix them later. As one of the top Digital Marketing Agencies in Dubai, Red Berries provides you with both the performance-optimized website development and the overall digital marketing strategy that will bring real ROI.

If you haven’t conducted a website audit for quite some time, then this would be a perfect time to do so and to learn about all the possible revenue that you are losing.

Objection-Handling FAQs

1. “Our website looks great and our team hasn’t complained, why would we spend money fixing something that isn’t visibly broken?”

Speed problems are hidden because they don’t come as visible bugs or complaints. They come as lost conversion opportunities that go unreported. The fact is, there’s no announcement saying your website has become slow, you just lose the visitor. Looking nice and functioning efficiently are two different things. A quick speed technical audit will help you understand how much your website losses in terms of bounce rate and lost sales and often in just a few percentage points which are real revenue losses in large numbers.

2. “We already rank well on Google, does page speed really matter that much for SEO?”

Ranking high doesn’t make your website safe from getting surpassed by the others. Today, the core web vitals play a significant role in determining the Google search result rankings and if you’re competitors start working on their websites’ speed they’ll gradually surpass you or at least equal you, especially if they do this in terms of mobile search requests where speed is even more sensitive factor. Page speed is not something you do once and forget about but a part of SEO which has to be worked on constantly.

3. “Won’t fixing page speed require a full website rebuild? We don’t have the budget or time for that right now.”

Many speed issues don’t require you to rebuild your entire website. Usually, a correct technical audit uncovers several particular issues that you can solve step-by-step without rebuilding the whole website. These include, oversized images, unused plugins, inefficient coding, improperly used advertising scripts etc. Most companies get the speed improvement from solving just these issues without changing anything else.