How fast is your website? Have you given it a health check recently? Did you know a one to three-second delay increases a website visitor’s likelihood to bounce by 32%? Another report suggests conversion rates drop by an average of 4.4% with every additional second of load time.

The speed of your website must not be underestimated. Having a fast website will allow users to see your content quicker, which leads to them engaging more, and ultimately increasing your lead conversion rate. Put simply, a quick website will get you more sales leads.

In regards to SEO, website speed is a huge factor in how Google will rank your site. Google understands the importance of speed for user experience, so uses this in its algorithm to rank sites.

If your website takes longer than five seconds to load, you’ll lose a number of potential customers, who will simply bounce back to Google search. Each and every second impacts your conversion rate. Obviously, the majority of your traffic will now be on a mobile phone, so understanding how fast your site loads on a 3G or 4G signal can also highlight any potential issues.

In our latest video for Property Industry Eye, we’ve taken a look at website speed and its importance. In the video, you can see a recent client example, where we launched a new, quicker site for them, which in turn saw increased performance for page views and sales leads.

Watch the video on why speed matters!

So how can you accelerate your website?  Sometimes it can be as simple as reducing large images on your homepage. We suggest images are never over 200k in file size, so make sure your images are optimised. Likewise, using video on your homepage can also slow it down, unless the video is compressed, and correctly embedded within the site. The next stage is to look at scripts and themes you might be using on your website – but then we get into tech talk. Older websites are built on legacy code that just isn’t as fast as modern websites.

Another quick tip would be to run a Google lighthouse report, which is an open-source, free automated tool for measuring the quality of web pages. Running it can highlight a number of factors or suggestions on how you can improve your website performance. It’s fantastic at showing you the size of your images on your homepage, and old scripts that can be slowing down your whole website.

We recently did exactly this, surveying the speed scores for a group of 100+ estate agents, for a conference presentation we gave… if you’d like us to measure your own individual website, and show you how you stack up, relative to the industry averages, on this (and a series of related metrics) please do get in touch with our benchmarking team on the link below.