Why your website’s performance experience matters
If you want to drive more traffic to your website and seriously boost engagement, you need to think about the website performance experience.
WEBSITE PERFORMANCE MATTERS
Since Google’s update, web performance experiences matter more than ever
Boosting engagement and driving more visitors to your website starts with website performance experience. This phrase might sound like a buzzword, and you’d be right – a visitor’s experience when browsing your website can genuinely make or break your business or organisation.
In this article, we’ll talk about what website performance experience is and why it’s so important.
WHAT IS WEBSITE PERFORMANCE EXPERIENCE?
Essentially, your website’s performance experience combines the user experience with website performance. Whether you manage an information portal, a directory, an eCommerce site or want to connect with potential customers and users in the online world, these two factors are essential to your success.
To unpack what website performance experience involves, we need to start by defining the user experience.
DEFINING USER EXPERIENCE
The term ‘user experience’ describes how a user interacts with your product or service and being able to understand what users are trying to do and how to make things easier for them. In terms of websites specifically, this means how a visitor will use and experience your website across multiple platforms in the digital world.
User experience is a broad term, meaning it’s about more than simple usability. It also includes:
- Accessibility
- Engagement
- Discoverability
- Credibility
- Usefulness
- Disability
- Aesthetic appeal
Together, all of these factors—when done well—form a positive user experience. When you neglect some of these factors by creating a confusing or obtrusive user interface, you’ll impede the user experience.
Now, let’s talk about website performance.
DEFINING WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
In short, website performance is all about how quickly your website loads. Website optimisation is another important term describing the steps taken to improve your website’s performance.
Visitors using mobile devices or with poor internet connections, website optimisation is essential for maintaining loyalty and user retention. If a user visits your website and can’t easily browse your content (because it’s loading too slowly), they’re likely to click away and never make a purchase or find the valuable information they were looking for.
As you can see, website performance and the user experience are intrinsically linked. With poor website performance comes a poor user experience, and vice versa.
HOW WEBSITE PERFORMANCE EXPERIENCE AFFECTS SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS
Your website’s page speed will also affect its SEO performance. Search engines specifically rank pages based on their loading speed—but website performance experience can also affect your search ranking indirectly.
For example, let’s say a user has visited your website but it’s taken too long to load so they leave – your website’s bounce rate will increase. Bounce rate measures how many visitors leave your site after viewing just one page—the lower the rate the better, not only for the user experience but for your Google page ranking as well.
Google in particular has been including page experience as part of their signals that generate search results to some users since May 28, 2020. The page experience update is now ramping up to be fully implemented.
All in all, the more you optimise the website performance experience, the higher your website will rank on search engines. Once your website reaches the top few search results, you’ll see a significant increase in website traffic.
LET’S SUMMARISE
The website performance experience combines two factors—website performance and the user experience. Optimising these two factors will ensure a smooth, streamlined, and positive experience for users visiting your website—boosting traffic, increasing sales, and bringing loyal customers back for more.
For more details on how to ensure your website’s performance experience is up-to-speed, please contact our Customer Solutions team on 03 9009 9610 or via our contact page
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