A few years ago, many people weren’t watching IP-based television and movies, though the recent growth of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and other entertainment video streaming providers has grown at an incredible pace.\u00a0 This is forced the spread of high speed infrastructure (cable and fiber internet mostly).<\/p>\n
Online gaming, from PC to XBOX and PS4, requires substantial bandwidth<\/a>.\u00a0 Many games need at least 3 MB\/s download and 1 MB\/s upload – for each and every player.\u00a0 In many households, there are multiple gaming consoles plus a mix of desktop PC’s, laptops, tablets and mobile phones, all on the go at the same time.<\/p>\n Even something relatively simple, like shopping online for a new gadget or clothing item requires a fair amount of bandwidth as well.\u00a0 There are multiple images to load, often large format with high resolution, plus product videos, testimonials and others – all of which are expected to be snappy, not stutter and generally appear instantly.<\/p>\n With dedicated game servers, speed is a must!<\/a><\/p>\n – 1 user making VOIP telephone calls, email, web browsing and streaming radio requires 1 to 3 MB\/s.<\/p>\n – 1 user watching streaming video needs 2 to 5 MB\/s.<\/p>\n – 1 user doing Skype video conferencing or playing interactive online games requires 3 to 6 MB\/s.<\/p>\n – For high-end First Person Shooters, it’s more like 6 to 10 MB\/s.<\/p>\n Site speed is pivotal, impacting your search rankings, UX, and conversion rate.<\/p>\n Just think about the individual user. No one wants their time to be wasted, so that person will leave if they perceive a site to be slow. The statistics back this up: more than 1 in 5 people will bounce away from a site if mobile pages are delayed for just 3 seconds<\/strong>, according to a Google report<\/a>.<\/p>\n The analysis also found that 9 out of every 10 top online stores would keep additional users on their site through focusing more on load time.<\/p>\n “[T]hose same sites are four times more likely to outsell their competitors once site speeds are optimized<\/strong>,” explained conversion expert Jon MacDonald<\/a>. “According to the study, each visitor (yes each visitor, not each customer) to an e-commerce website is worth, on average, about $50 to the business.”<\/p>\n The $50 amount is an attempt to estimate the total of upfront sales, lead value, and branding.<\/p>\n Why not try a web cloud hosting package from KnownHost? With a 30 day money back guarantee you’ve got nothing to lose.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Now let\u2019s combine these numbers. If your website has 5,000 unique visitors<\/strong> monthly, three seconds of page-loading delay will mean you are effectively losing 1000 (1 in 5) of them to speed. Assuming each of them is worth $50, the total loss is $50,000<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So, financial gain is the #1 reason for wanting a fast website<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Web is a land of snap-judgments<\/strong>. Just like a restaurant, your audience, prospects, and customers will be pleased if their Internet \u201cfood\u201d comes to them quickly and without difficulty. Speed is associated with efficiency, professionalism, respect, honesty, and follow-through.<\/p>\n A website that fails at delivering data promptly gives us the impression that it is unreliable<\/strong> and doesn\u2019t deserve our business. Incredibly, 79% of consumers<\/a> claim they won\u2019t return to sites that are slow to load.\u00a0 You never get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression!<\/strong><\/p>\n When we use the Internet, we have become accustomed to speed<\/strong>, and we won\u2019t settle for laggard sites.<\/p>\n Just look at this data from Kissmetrics<\/a>, which has similar findings to Aberdeen in terms of the small slices of time impacting user behavior:<\/p>\n \u201cThink about how you use the internet every day,\u201d said response time specialist Daren Low<\/a>. \u201cYou\u2019re looking for quick answers and immediate results<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Speed has become part of the user experience.\u00a0 We throw video and high resolution images around as if they were tweets – despite them requiring time to download and render.\u00a0 Our design choices and content tactics demand speed, otherwise<\/strong> we’d have to reshape our entire website from scratch<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A strong user experience is about making things as easy and seamless<\/strong> as you can for visitors. That means they get what they want right away rather than waiting for your site. In this sense, load time is absolutely critical to UX.<\/p>\n When we talk about speed, most of the conversation naturally centers around the immediate issue of a user\u2019s perception and behavior: if your site loads slowly, you can quickly start losing the users on your site right now<\/em>.<\/p>\n What about next year, though? Word-of-mouth suffers, said Low. \u201cEstablished websites are less likely to link back to your content,\u201d he said. \u201cIt might even put people off signing up to your newsletter.\u201d\u00a0 High performance hosting can make the difference.<\/p>\n Google is, so it says, aggressively concerned with speed<\/strong>. One of the main objectives of the company is supposedly<\/em> to support fast access to helpful information and credible services. Most notably, Google announced in 2010<\/a> that speed was a ranking factor.<\/p>\n The Silicon Valley giant\u2019s commitment to speed is, in fact, correct \u2013 based on a comparison of search rankings to time to first byte<\/strong> (TTFB).<\/p>\n TTFB is a metric gauging the amount of time between when you click to load a given webpage and when the initial byte comes through, Billy Hoffman explained for Moz<\/a>. \u201cThe TTFB result was surprising [when] a clear correlation was identified between decreasing search rank and increasing time to first byte<\/strong>,\u201d he said. \u201cSites that have a lower TTFB respond faster and have higher search result rankings than slower sites with a higher TTFB.\u201d<\/p>\n Another way Google has shown that it increasingly prioritizes user speed<\/strong> is that, as of June 2016, there\u2019s a free speed test<\/a> integrated into Google Search \u2013 accessed through the key phrase check internet speed<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Some people have questioned whether or not speed really is all that important. After all, Google clarified in its 2010 explanation that \u2013 at least at that time \u2013 site speed was an insignificant ranking factor, influencing no more than 1% of search requests.<\/p>\n However, since we are talking above about how users respond to 2-second or 3-second load times, it\u2019s important to understand Google\u2019s perspective on that same timeframe. The bottom line is that if it takes even just two seconds to load, you will be negatively impacted in terms of how much time the search engine spends crawling your site.<\/p>\n That\u2019s evident from a comment made by John Mueller of Google in response to a question in the Webmaster Central Help Forum<\/a>. A user of Webmaster Tools was wondering why he was getting \u201cTemporarily Unreachable\u201d errors messages via the \u201cFetch as Google\u201d feature of Webmaster Tools.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL),\u201d said Mueller. \u201cThis has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site, and you’re seeing that in Fetch as Google as well.\u201d\u00a0 Google has made high performance hosting a requirement.<\/p>\nOn average:<\/h3>\n
Why Speed Matters\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
For First Impressions – Speed Matters<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Fast is Expected, Everywhere Online<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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User Experience<\/h2>\n
Your Reputation Matters<\/h2>\n
Speed is Now a Ranking Factor for Search Engines<\/strong><\/h2>\n