Comments on: Why should businesses pay attention to the new Google Analytics site speed report?

By: Owen.B

Owen.B — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:09:41 +0000

I’m the same as Gabi, nothing inspires me to leave a website like slow load times. Apparently the average user will leave a page if they haven’t found what they want within 3 seconds! I don’t think it is much of a problem these days though as less and less sites are using image heavy Flash animated designs and internet speeds are fast enough now that it doesn’t make too much difference to the user anyway which I would guess is why Google doesn’t give it too much weight.

By: Gabi

Gabi — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:02:55 +0000

I totally agree, and I think that website builders and bloggers do care about the speed. I personally, always get upset when a page loads slowly. In the most cases, I leave the page and check an other one. And that isn’t good from the business owner’s view (I mean the first one:)) Every site should be optimized for a fast loading and a high speed, costumers don’t want to wait for a website.

By: Dennis Miedema

Dennis Miedema — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:48:23 +0000

Hey Francis, great post! I’d like to give my two cents here: to say that Cutss downplayed site speed is an understatement when you do the math. Why? Google processes billions of searches a month, so saying “only” 1 in 100 searches was affected means at least tens of millions of searches were affected.

Another insight straight out of the world of conversion optimization: I read some study found that 1 tenth of a second lowers your conversion rate by 1%. In other words: if a page takes 6 seconds to load, your conversion rate will have dropped by 60%. Guess what that means? Every additional second of loading time lowers the number of sales your site generates. If that doesn’t motivate you to do something about site speed, then I don’t know what does!

By: Marlon

Marlon — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 10:28:42 +0000

I made the grave mistake of trying out a new (cheap) webhost recently, to host a client’s blogs. The loading speeds are quite bad (understatement), and understandably, the blog has failed to rank well for its keywords – a clear sign that Google looks at page speed when ranking your blog, contrary to what Matt Cutts says. And even if its not an issue in terms of rankings, its a pain-in-the-A for any visitors. A slow blog will ensure that you lose visitors (returning visitors) in the long run. It would also have an impact on other metrics such as the bounce-rate.