Delivering great user experience is every business’s priority, regardless of their industry or niche. A website that captivates new or returning customers is likely to perform better than one that does not. As your customers’ behavior on the web continues to evolve, you can’t afford to ignore the importance of website load speed.

Here’s why load speed is still a more significant issue than you might think:

Today’s Customers are Impatient

When you are on a website that takes forever to load, how does that make you feel? In case you’re like most people, then you probably experience some emotion related to anger or frustration. And when you get to a website that makes you feel angry or frustrated, do you usually stay on that website? Probably not. Instead, you’d go to another website, right?

The people who are entering your STB competitions online right now are no different. They don’t possess the patience to sit around, waiting for a slow website to load on their phone or desktop; they want everything within instants. The more you make them wait, the more interest they would lose in you.

In a report by Google in 2012, most smartphone users were willing to wait for no more than 5 seconds for a website to show up before moving on to another one. Do you think people are more patient today or less than they were eight years ago?

Website Load Speed Impacts Your SEO

Google started making use of site speed as a ranking signal in their algorithm way back in 2010, and it continues to work as one of the many factors that decide where your website is displayed in the search results.

Site speed mirrors how fast a website acknowledges web requests.

Speeding up websites is imperative — not just for site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites produce happy users, and we have observed in our research endeavors that when a site responds slowly, visitors are likely to spend less time there.

Google knows that directing people to slow loading websites can prove disastrous on the user experience, so it comes as no news that the search giant still values site speed. A fast loading website can enhance your SEO. And this where CDN comes in.

The warm embrace of CDN

A CDN decreases the distance information has to travel between the server and the user. It is a network of servers, rather than a single server, with locations in a number of geographic areas. When a user gains access to a website, information is gathered from the server location, which is nearest to them. The result, however, is a faster flow of data.

That boils it down to the simplest of terms, but there’s plenty of information available about how a content delivery network functions and how that measures up to using only an origin server to house a website.

All in all, you can switch to a content delivery network in order to make your STB competition website load faster for users, decrease your bandwidth costs, improve your website’s search optimization, and be able to deal with traffic spikes. It’s a useful and practical option for many website owners.