A strategy that is often overlooked, website loading speed and Google’s Core Web Vitals optimisation. Without ensuring that your website loads quickly for visitors you will lose conversions. And Google ranks pages with poor Core Web Vital scores lower in search results. This will ultimately result in revenue loss.
To put it simply, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website or landing page that convert (do what you want them to do). Depending on your business goals this can mean different things (purchases, subscriptions, user registrations, form submissions, ….).
A one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by ~7%. This means that if your webshop drives €20.000 in sales each day you will lose over €500.000 in revenue in a year.
Google is not only recommending good web practices and encouraging better performing websites. They are demanding it with Page Experience metrics, which include mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, security and accessibility.
From mid-June 2021 Google takes Page Experience scores into account for their search ranking algorithms. This means that websites with lower Page Experience scores will be ranked lower.
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The short answer: yes
Website load time or page load time refers to how long it takes for a website, or web page to fully load and appear on the screen. Many different factors have an impact on how fast a page loads.
You could be questioning whether or not shaving a few (milli)seconds of your website’s page load time really has an impact on your business. Here are some statistics to help to understand the importance of good page loading speeds.
Core Web Vitals are the subset of metrics that are part of Google’s page experience score. It’s Google’s effort to focus more attention on creating faster and more user-centric websites.
With Google now penalizing search ranking for websites with bad Web Vitals scores, they basically force every website owner to keep this on top of mind.
Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome. Google stated that the metrics that makeup Core Web Vitals will evolve over time and therefore you should monitor them on a regular basis. Currently, there are 4 important metrics:
You can measure your page speed and web vitals via online tools like GTmetrix or Pingdom. You can generate a Lighthouse report in Google Chrome developer console or test your site on web.dev, Google’s website dedicated to page experience.
Google Search Console also continuously monitors Page Experience, Core Web Vitals and Mobile Usability. They can be viewed in the Experience tab of the Search Console menu.
