Studies have always been around to show us how things are preforming, how things are working, how good or bad things are. Within the last five months, a couple studies where done to see if there was any sort of correlation between a sites loading speed and page ranking, as well as an observation between “Time To First Byte” and search rankings.
In these studies, although it seemed that there wasn’t anything that proved that loading time directly affected search ranking, it does seem that there would be an impact on user experience. Naturally, if you end up having a bad user experience with a site, such as slow loading time, you’re probably not going to want to continue using the site. In a nutshell, if you aren’t using the site, due to slow loading time in this case, you’re search ranking should be affected.
But on the flip side, it would seem that there is also correlation between improved site performance and increased conversion rates, user engagement and customer satisfaction. Zoompf has taken the time to write an article for Moz that shows the research that was done concerning slow loading time with conversions, as well as giving some high level practices that generally yield the most benefit for the least amount of effort.
To find out what you can do to increase your site’s performance, as well as increase conversions, follow the link below to read the full article:
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-conversion-rates-with-a-faster-website