Website speed is the speed at which the pages of the website load. The speed of the website is a major contributing factor for its effective delivery of content to the users. Average Generation Time is the average amount of time taken to load a page in your website. There are two issues that take the time – how fast the web server generates the page and the speed at which the user or visitor downloads the page response from the server.

Slower website speeds can be disastrous for your business as the user may switch his order to another website which is much faster. High bounce rate and low number of pages per visit result as the user would not have patience to wait for the page to take its time to load.

Faster loading websites give better user experience, making him stay longer and use the services or products of the website. This also contributes to the ranking in the search engines, improving the SEO of the website. Even if keywords are not competitive, website speed can sometimes help your website’s rankings.

Many times, the page may be visited many times even if the page does not load as fast as other pages. This can happen if the user finds his relevant information while the page is loading and thus in a shorter time. So, SEO and keywords can help if the website speed is slow.

The quality score for a paid media is determined by how relevant Google finds the website’s landing page for the searched keyword. Google, in turn, determines the relevance according to the user experience and number of visits to the webpage. So, if the speed is slow, it leads to bad user experience and so, Google rates it as low quality score. Quality score also determines the cost per click (CPC) and position on Search Engine Results Page, apart from use of competitive keywords and website speed.

Social websites favour higher site speed when it is about displaying ads.

Assessing the speed of your website at regular intervals is very important for your business. A number of tools are available for such analysis. Based on the results of the analysis, a baseline can be decided for optimizing the speed of your website. Updates like using relevant keywords, resizing images and videos and disabling unwanted plugins, etc can be performed.