#51 – Why fast website speed matters – Brent Wilson from Five Q

Ministry At Scale

In this episode, we bring to you another session from the 2021 Digital Ministry Conference. Brent Wilson, with Five Q, explains the importance of website speed and performance and how it can improve the online experience for your customers and users.

According to Brent, website performance is mostly about speed. This involves the initial load time of the page, important information, and interactive elements. User perception is an important factor in website speed as well because a user might perceive faster loading times than are happening if done correctly. They’ll also be more likely to put up with slower load times if they have a good user experience.

Why is website speed important? Because the users are important and their experience matters. If they experience slow load times, they are more likely to leave the website. Every customer who leaves a website out of frustration because of poor website performance is another customer lost. There’s not much time to wait either. Users make their first judgments of a website within the first two seconds. The longer a site takes to give a user useful content, the more likely they are to leave. So, you only have a few seconds to keep a customer based on first impressions.

Users aren’t the only ones that matter either. For the last few years, Google has said that faster sites will rank higher than slower sites.

Some tips for creating a faster site and a better user experience:

Use servers that are geographically close to your users

Use good coding behind the scenes

Incorporate optimized images onto your website

Do what you can to reduce third party scripts if possible

You can also ask yourself “Does the website feel fast?”. This will help give you an idea of what the user experience is like and can help identify parts of your website that need adjustments. For more tips on improving website speed, listen to the full episode with Brent Wilson.