By Justine Daley
Over 50 percent of traffic to your website is from a mobile device, but all of your website visitors want your website to be fast.
Site speed is important; you may have read previous articles about site speed being a ranking factor, especially with the impending mobile first Google index. But recently when I spoke with Eric Enge at an AMA Cincinnati event, and he had a different perspective. We should be focused on site speed first and foremost from a user experience perspective.
To reinforce his point, he mentioned a few specific examples:
- Google that increasing page load time from four-tenths of a second to just nine-tenths of a
second decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. - Amazon found that for every 100 milliseconds of increased load time that it reduced their sales
by 1% for each one.
They aren’t losing this revenue because their ranking fluctuates. This is all due to the user’s experience.
Now these may seem like extreme examples—comparing your law firm website to Amazon is like comparing Apples to Cheesecake—but if Amazon loses revenue, how many potential clients could you be losing because your website takes too long to load on their mobile device?
Site speed isn’t something to be improved easily; it is something that our team is constantly working on improving by minimizing CSS, testing different WordPress plugins, optimizing images, and more.
In an effort to improve site speed and user experience, many SEO experts and website publishers are turning to AMP.
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. If you have a WordPress or Drupal site, this is easily implemented through plugin usage, but just because it is easily implemented doesn’t mean it is the answer when it comes to site speed.
The reasons these pages are as fast as they are is because they remove or minimize any and all items on the pages that could slow them down: images, javascript, and more. This means that your conversion elements and anything that visually communicates your brand is no longer on these pages.
This is a big reason why we have chosen to sit back, and wait when it comes to implementing these pages. We have yet to see the benefit of the speed when you lose the conversion optimization. Right now you will most see publishers and news organizations using AMP to speed up the load time of their articles, but we aren’t seeing many attorneys utilizing it. However, we’re interested to see how these pages evolve and whether or not they should be integrated into our law firm marketing strategies in the future.