Struggling with loading lag? Regardless of whether you’ve noticed an increase in your website’s bounce rates, or your customers have been complaining about poor website load time, it’s important to keep an eye on your website loading speed.
Crucial for ensuring your website is optimised for search engines and online users, the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) experts at Aqueous Digital can help.
Below, we explain the average load speed for a website and what you can do to improve your website load time in 2024.
How fast should my website load?
In simple terms, your website load time should be as fast as possible.
According to Tooltester’s 2023 Website Loading Times Report, the average load speed for a website is 2.5 seconds for desktop users and 8.6 seconds for mobile users.
What is a good loading time for a website?
Based on the average load speed for a website, a good website loading speed (accessed via desktop) is therefore between two and three seconds.
Similarly, with mobile networks becoming faster, website load speed for mobile users shouldn’t be much longer than this either.
If your website load time is longer than three seconds, then you may want to explore the reasons why to increase your chances of ranking higher and driving organic traffic to your website.
Not only will online users navigate away from your website if it takes too long to load, but Google and other search engines also use page loading time as a ranking signal.
This means websites with slow loading speed are more likely to appear lower down in search results, impacting the volume of organic traffic that your website receives.
How can I tell how long a website takes to load?
Fortunately, there are many tools that you can utilise to test your website loading speed.
This long of free and subscription tools includes Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom’s website speed test.
Alternatively, you can also learn more about your website loading speed by navigating to the page that you want to test, right-clicking the page and selecting ‘Inspect’.
This will open a window with various tabs including a ‘Network’ tab. Select this tab.
From here, you’ll see a list of elements begin to appear as the page loads.
Next to each named element, there’s a ‘time’ column that indicates precisely how long it’s taken each aspect to load in either milliseconds or seconds.
This should give you an idea of your website loading speed.
How do I fix a website that takes too long to load?
Is your website taking far too long to load? If customers are quickly leaving your site (as suggested by a high bounce rate), then your website load time could be in need of some attention.
Luckily, there are plenty of changes you can implement to help improve your website load time.
However, to identify which aspects require fixing or fine-tuning without impacting any SEO progress you’ve made, you should always conduct a thorough audit first.
Once you’ve identified which aspects of your website are contributing to your sluggish website loading speed, you can research and implement the best solution without compromising on user experience.
However, some of the most common reasons for slow website load time can include unoptimised images, ineffective caching, excessive http requests, JavaScript issues, poor hosting, heavy traffic, bulky website code, and unnecessary or excessive website plugins.
Speed up your website loading time with expert SEO support
At the award-wining digital marketing agency, Aqueous Digital, our team of SEO professionals has helped countless clients to improve their website load time.
As specialists in SEO, content strategies, and reputation management for high-net-worth individuals, we can test various aspects across your website to help determine which areas could benefit from improvement to support a faster website loading speed.
Regardless of where you’re based, we can support businesses across the Yorkshire area, including popular cities like Leeds and Sheffield.
If you’d like to find out more about our SEO services and how we can speed up your website load time for desktop and mobile users, then feel free to contact our experienced team today to arrange your free, no-obligation consultation.
To discuss your requirements in more detail prior to your consultation, you can also give us a call on 0800 285 1424 or email your enquiry to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk.
However you decide to reach out to our friendly and knowledgeable team, we hope to hear from you soon to learn more about your website marketing requirements.
