Why Are Fast Recruitment Websites So Important?

Measuring How Fast Your Recruitment Website Is

First of all, how do you measure the speed of your website? There are several options but I prefer to use Google Pagespeed Insights. Simply input your website home address and Google will show you the speed of your website on desktop & mobile. It will give you a percentage score, along with suggestions on how to improve speed, which you can pass onto your recruitment website developer to implement. There is also Pingdom, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, Uptrends, plus several more. 

When focusing on areas such as paid marketing, integrations, content, social media and design it’s easy to overlook website speed, which in my opinion is probably one of the most important traits of a good website (among accessibility and UX). 

Websites with large JavaScript files, video content, heavy CSS files, high-definition images, WordPress plugins all contribute to a slower load time for a webpage. Where your website is hosted can also contribute to a slower page speed, for example if your website is only hosted in a data centre in the UK and someone visits your website in California then the data has further to travel - using a CDN can remedy this. 

A fast website is important for a number of reasons, including first impressions, a better user experience, decreased bounce rates, increased conversion rates and better search engine rankings. 

Firstly, website speed helps form the very first impression for a visitor of that website and business. When I click on your website, before I see any content, text, images, headers, nav bars, etc I see how long it takes to load. A faster website seems more professional, reliable and I’m not immediately frustrated or confused on why it’s taking so long to load. 

Secondly is that it provides a better user experience for your visitors. A slow website, whether it’s on desktop or mobile will frustrate your users, causing them to navigate away and visit a competitor's website, which may have a better user experience. This can lead to a higher bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page.Higher bounce rates will decrease your search engine ranking. 

Thirdly, a fast website is also important for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google use algorithms to determine the relevance and quality of a website, and one of the factors they consider is the website's speed. A slow-loading website may rank lower in search results, which can result in fewer visitors and potentially fewer converted candidates & clients. If I’m looking for a new job as an accountant in London I may only contact the first few recruitment agencies in the search results so ranking is so important in getting good, relevant incoming candidates. 

A one-second site speed improvement can increase mobile conversions by up to 27%.

47% of people don’t wait for more than two seconds for a web page to load.

If you’ve noticed your website speed is slow or you’ve run a performance test on it and it’s not as high as you’d expect then speak to your developer / design agency to rectify the issues or speak to us about how we can create a much faster website for you. 

As a side note you should be looking for a minimum Performance score of 60+, with Accessibility, SEO & Best Practice all around 90+.