The majority of website owners are concerned about their website’s design and functionality. However, design and functionality should never affect a site’s performance. This isn’t only important to your site’s visitors but to search engines as well.No one likes a website that takes a long time to open. Just remember how many times you’ve tried to watch a YouTube video before abandoning it due to slow buffering. The same thing applies to your website. In fact, numerous statistics show that slow loading times are directly connected to user bounce rates. Users are not willing to wait more than a couple of seconds to open a website. Instead, they click away.Your website’s bounce rate is also connected to search engine rankings. If people aren’t sticking to your site, this tells Google that there’s something wrong with it. Furthermore, there are more serious implications to this trend. Ever since 2010, Google includes website speed as an essential element of the Page Rank algorithm. Your website can be ranked from 0 all the way up 10. Without a fast-performing website, you won’t get far when it comes to Google’s organic listings. In 2016, Google applied this algorithm to mobile pages as well. This is a huge number of users now access the Internet through smartphones and tablets.If you’d like to improve your website’s speed, there are some usual suspects to begin with. Slow hosting, uncompressed images and third-party plugins can all take a massive toll on your customer experience. Once these are dealt with, problematic CSS files, scripts referrals and code efficiency are the next steps.