While it is essential to have a mobile-friendly site, quick loading pages are equally important. The sad news is that there are a lot of website owners who don’t seem to realize that their loading times can make or break your dental SEO efforts.
How fast your site content loads on the mobile screen of your visitors is crucial.
It is very relevant because people today have become very impatient. This is why most site visitors often go back to the browser after just waiting for 3 to 5 seconds.
That 3-second waiting time may already be reasonable but for most people, this short span of time is precious. Sadly, there are a lot of websites that take 8 up to 10 seconds just to load one page and this can be very damaging for your dental SEO efforts.
The main issue here is that this can drastically increase your bounce rates. The bounce rate refers to the very short span of time that a visitor spends on your site actively. It will be a bounce if the visitor only stays for several seconds. And even if they stay on the site for a few minutes, this is still a bounce if they don’t interact with your site content.
Those bounces that take place in a matter of seconds are actually the most crucial. These indicate that visitors are not interested in your website content at all. Conversely, this can also indicate that while the visitor may be interested in your site content, the bounce might have occurred because of loading times.
How will you be able to improve the loading time of your website, then?
If you ever feel as if you have slow loading times, you can optimize your site in different ways. The most useful and common one is to reduce the size of images you include in your website. There are websites with very heavy headers that can lengthen the loading times.
The important thing to remember here is that websites that load fast will constantly get better results. You can expect this through conversions and engagement.
Some other improvements that can help boost the loading times of your website include the following:
• Stay away from inline JS and CSS files
• Stay away from redirects
• Reduce HTTP requests
• Work on cache optimization
• Utilize G-Zip encoding
These improvements can all help improve your loading times. Always keep in mind that those few seconds could make a big difference between getting a new patient and making a visitor leave your site to look for the next best dentist available.