Is your horse business’ website tuned for page speed? 

Not sure?

Don’t fret. This blog post zooms in on the SEO topic of page speed and it’s pretty important for your horse business’ online presence to have this nailed down.

Google is constantly evolving to improve the user experience with the search engine. Today, Google has become the top search engine in most countries, and therefore your customers' preferred search engine.

Because Google is evolving, and getting better at delivering the best search results, it is important to keep a close eye on the parameters from which Google evaluates your website.

The loading speed is the time it takes for your horse buisness’ website to be fully loaded and ready to be displayed to the visitor once they have clicked into your link.

Google made an update in 2018 that made it more important than ever that your website has a super-fast loading speed on all pages - from the front page, to the sales pages and even the blog, if you have one.

Is your horse business’ website loading like a racehorse?

Google's own data shows that the bounce rate increases by as much as 32% at a loading speed of 3 seconds (compared to a loading speed of 1 second).

And a loading speed of 5 seconds increases the bounce rate by as much as 90%.

So, if you have never checked up on your page speed, now is the time to improve the loading speed.   

Yes, 90%!

This means that your horse business could lose a lot of leads, and potential customers, if your website has a slow loading time /loading speed. Today, no one bothers to wait, even if just 3 seconds seems like a short time, it's actually an eternity for your visitors.

Google knows that!

Having website visitors sit and  wait  is not a good user experience - not for your equestrian website or for Google.

It just doesn’t slide anymore.

But what’s worse is if your visitors first enter your website, just to leave again immediately simply due to the fact that your website is slow and not fully loaded.

Eventually this will hurt you horse business’ bounce rate.

What is the bounce rate on your horse business’ website?

The bounce rate is a measurement of visitors who only see one page on your website and leave again without clicking on the website. For instance, if you have 100 visitors on your website but only 80 of those visitors see one, single page, your website's bounce rate will be 80%.

Obviously, it is important to have as low a bounce rate as possible, as it’s not that positive if visitors leave your website as soon as they have landed on it.

You want them to stay, click around, read your texts and of course buy your products, right?

At this point I hope you see that your horse business’ website is in many ways like having a physical store where you would like to get as many people in the door to have a browse and find something they want to buy or sign up for.

 However, if you have a lot of website visitors who just stand around at your virtual doorstep only to skip entering – this will hurt your bounce rate (and your bottom line).

Let’s look at an example of this.

For instance, if your bounce rate is 50%, this equates to 10 people entering through your virtual front door and 5 of them directly run to the exit and leave your site.

These 5 people only got a glimpse of what your horse business had to offer. A glimpse. Nothing else. At a physical store, if you were quick to act you could ‘ve quickly engaged with these 5 people and ask what their reason for leaving the store as about. Obviously you would use this information to adjust your store and overall customer experience left the accordingly.

The same is actually hat you need to do for your website – the only thing is, you can’t just ask your visitors (who have bounced from your site), but you CAN get help from various analysis tools. These tools will give you clues as to what you can optimize to get your visitors further into your horse business’ website (these tools will not be covered in this post – I’ll save that for another one).

To sum up - every “rejection” or bounce equals a loss of a potential sale or conversion on your site.

How bounce rates affect your horse busines’ rankings in organic search results

If Google sees that most of the visitors to your website merely view one page, Google will consider that page to be a bad user experience.

Google views such a "rejection" negatively, and in relation to the loading speed, they made it clear back in 2010 that the loading speed will have a direct influence on the ranking in search results. In 2010, only the loading speed of the computer version of the website was affected. At the time, Google announced that only 1% of searches would be affected and that this would only happen with English searches on google.com. 

Fast forward to 2018, Google announced that the loading speed of the mobile version of your website will start to have more and more impact on search engine rankings. 

In July that same year, Google announced that now the loading speed of the mobile version will have a big impact on rankings in the search results.

Once again, Google announced that this loading speed update in their search engine will only affect a percentage of all searches via Google - but without specifying an exact percentage. A very typical and vague announcement from Google, which raised more questions than answers.

However, here are some tips to help you see how Google's load impacts your horse business’ website:

#1 Google's loading speed standard affects the slowest pages on your website

Or to be more precise - "it will only have consequences on pages on your website that provide the slowest user experience for visitors".

For pages that load well its’ minimal what you achieve by optimizing speed a few more hundred milliseconds. Instead, focus on whether you have some pages on your equestrian website that have a slow loading speed. Especially if they have historically had a lot of organic traffic.

#2 How slow is slow?

Google gives no indication of what they think is how slow, slow. But their testing tool Google PageSpeed ​​Insights can give you some hints.

PageSpeed ​​Insights considers a loading speed to be slow if it takes 3 seconds or more to deliver what Google calls "the First Contentful Paint" (FCP) and more than 4.2 seconds to deliver "DOMContentLoaded" (DCL).

FCP measures when the visitor first sees something visually on your horse business’ website. DCL measures when your website's HTML source code loads.

PageSpeed ​​is a very useful tool that tells you approximately how your website is ranked compared to other websites. Using the image above as an example, it tells you that your website is in the bottom third and that you should do something about it.

PageSpeed ​​Insights is a good tool, but only gives you the opportunity to test one page on the website at a time - not an entire website!

There are many who have misunderstood this and  only tested the front page of their horse business’ website, and have mistakenly thought that the result was for the entire website. Every single page on your website needs to be measured and speed optimized if they are to perform and have the good rankings on Google.

If you already use Google Analytics for your equestrian website, you may be familiar with the Loading Speed ​​tool found in Analytics. With this tool you can easily examine which pages of your horse business that are not performing. It can also help you see important trends that show whether it is getting worse or better.

Just be aware that Google Analytics is by default set to show "total page load time", ie. the time from the time you click on a link until the page is fully loaded. Although it gives a good insight, it is not the measurement parameter that I have found most useful.

For some more interesting measurements, look at the DOM Timings report under the Google Analytics loading speed menu, where you can see measurements of the average document content loaded time and an average measurement of document interactive time. These measurements tell you when the content will be available to the visitor - or to put it as it is, when the page will be usable. Visitors get stuck if they see something happening on the page.

Once you have found the pages using the Analytics tool that you find worrying, I would recommend that you test them with PageSpeed ​​Insights. PageSpeed ​​actually tells you what to optimize to improve page loading speed.

 

# 3 How can your horse business avoid slow pages?

Now you've done the easy part of finding the pages that you think will be affected by Google's page speed standard.

But what do you do now? Typically, the most obvious and low-hanging fruit is to optimize the images on the page. This is actually something that you will be able to do yourself without having to pay an expert for it.

The other things that PageSpeed ​​recommends will require the help of a developer or technically savvy person, because several of the recommendations require changes to the website's system files - and that part is certainly not for everyone!

 

 #4 Create great content for your horse business

Another very useful insight Google has given us about their page speed standard is the folloing: 

"The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content". 

So, a page with good and relevant content will still be able to rank high on Google, even if it has a slow loading speed. But conversely, a fast page with poor content will not rank high on Google. 

Key takeaway:  if you have good and relevant content that is already performing, but the page is a bit slow, it's just about getting the page speed optimized. Here are some real results for the performance of the site.