Website Speed is Vital for Enhanced User Experience and SEO

It's expected from users that your site will run fast, feel smooth, and look good. Make sure you're giving today's customer what they want.

Online readers today are spoiled for choice, which makes them highly demanding and naturally impatient. Therefore, it is vital to have good download speed for your dental practice website to ensure it does not lose potential visitors while a web page is taking time to load. The speed of your website also will affect your SEO standing.

SEO Benefits

Google and Bing are committed to making the whole web faster. Page speed is one of the key signals that their search algorithms use to determine website rankings for both desktop and mobile sites.

Particularly, with a greater number of search users relying on mobile search, page download speed has become an even more important consideration for the search engines in order to deliver a consummate search experience.

User Satisfaction

The average web user of today expects a website to load very fast. During peak traffic hours, he or she may be willing to move over to a competitor’s website to seek information instead of struggling with a slow loading website.

E-commerce experts also point out that many online shoppers may not complete a purchase if the site is too slow. Readers want seamless, uninterrupted surfing experience when they visit a website. Thus, the quality and speed of your website is likely to have an impact on how a new user perceives your dental practice. If the site loads fast and operates smooth, they will most likely see your practice as professional and committed to a high-quality experience. On the other hand, a website that does not satisfy the users’ needs will turn them off your practice. Potentially leading them to believe you would not provide high quality care.

Causes For Slow Loading Pages

Poorly Optimized Images

If your web pages include poorly optimized images, it will slow down your page download speed. Choose the right balance between image quality, size, and download speed. Make sure that the photos are included in JPEG format, while the logos or icons may work better in the PNG format.

Plug-in or Widgets

In some cases, the plug-in or widget overload may be the culprit behind a slow page. Assess the download speed of social media or comment buttons that may be included in some of the web pages.

Adobe Flash

If your website includes Adobe Flash multimedia and software platform, it can drag down the speed of your web pages. Mobile users may particularly struggle to download a site that includes Flash due to its incompatibility with their device. It is a good idea to test how efficiently your website is loading on different devices and browsers.

Ads and Design Themes

If your website includes advertisements, it is likely to slow down its speed. Sometimes an obsession with creating an extraordinary site design can lead to a poorly loading site. Balance must also be maintained with regard to the range of embedded media such as slide shows and videos that you host on your dental practice website.

Improve Your Site Speed

Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights to help you analyze and optimize your site speed and performance. With PageSpeed Insights you can make your site faster and more mobile-friendly. It will allow you to install the PageSpeed module to integrate with your web server and optimize your website automatically.

PageSpeed Insights will also measure your site performance individually for desktop devices and mobile devices. The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. Higher scores are better, and a score of 85 or more indicates that the web page is performing well.

The Internet and mobile technologies have gone through dramatic changes in recent years and continue to transform the world at a rapid pace. However, website speed has consistently remained a vital part of the reader experience as well as a critical SEO factor all through this period of tumultuous growth.

It is a worthwhile effort to evaluate the speed and overall performance of your dental website periodically and address any issues that may arise from time to time.

Related Articles

• How to Repurpose Your Dental Blogs for a More Targeted Response
• How to Make Your Website User-Friendly

About the Author:

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education, and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of 180+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dentists who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.