Why is it now essential that you have a fast loading, mobile friendly website?

When customers visit your website it needs to load quickly. If your site’s pages take too long to load, then even the most patient visitor will give up waiting and will head off to the next site – probably your competitor’s site.

Not only will a slow loading site frustrate visitors, but it will upset Google too. The search engine giant recently stated that slow loading sites will now be penalised, so having a fast loading site is essential.

As well as penalising slow sites, Google has also announced that websites that are not optimised for smart phones and tablets will also suffer lower rankings in search results pages. This means that even if your website is fast loading and full of valuable content to your visitors, your site will not be shown within the search engines when people search for it if it doesn’t display correctly on smart phones and tablets. This rule is probably informed by the fact that more than 50% of website traffic is now via a smartphone or tablet and Google want the user to be able to easily navigate around a website that adapts to suit to all environments.

In order to achieve fast page loads, Black Hen uses pages that employ very little code and avoid certain functions (such as large image sliders) that can have a negative impact on your site’s speed performance. All the websites we build employ a ‘responsive’ page layout meaning that the pages of the website adapt to fit the environment they are being accessed on. This means that all our websites look great and work perfectly on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile platforms.