Is page load speed important? Yes and no.

When developing websites, Seacoast Web Development takes into account page load speed. I use several tools to check page load including GT Metrix, Pingdom, and Google Speed Insights. Using these tools, I am able to test the entire website’s page load speed. The goal is to achieve a page load speed of minimum time. There are different views on this. Most websites load in 2.9 seconds. Faster websites will load in under 1 second. So why is this important?

Back when desktops were the primary source of viewing web pages, a page load speed of 3-4 seconds was quick. However, more than half of Internet traffic comes from mobile devices and mobile devices load slower than desktops. This makes page load speed important. If you want visitors to view your website, it better be fast.

What causes pages to load slowly? One thing for sure is that if your images are not optimized, your website will load slow. Also, if your website is making too many calls to resources, this can cause lag. For example, utilizing several libraries (CSS, Fonts, etc.) can cause your web pages to make several calls to the server each time a new page loads and slow the site.

It may seem like a trivial difference between 1.9 seconds and .9 seconds (1 second), but in the world of websites, it is a lot of time. Yes, one would hope that people could be a little more patient but people will leave your site if they have to wait.

Some sites do have higher page load times (popular sites like Amazon and Target) and may score lower than other websites. They are large sites, e-commerce for example, and have a lot of images and content to load.

So, does page load speed matter? Yes and no. Yes, because you want your website optimized to its fullest and functioning at a high performance. No, some sites just have a lot of ‘stuff’ to load and once the website is cached in your browser, it will load faster.