MY NUMBER 1 RECOMMENDATION TO CREATE FULL TIME INCOME ONLINE: CLICK HERE
I tell my clients two things around which they should frame discussions about organic search content and user experience:
- Search engines want to provide their users with answers in one click or less.
- If you design your website with the idea of getting your visitors’ questions answered as efficiently as possible, your website should get more attention in organic search
Search engines must ensure the satisfaction of their users in order to maintain and/or increase their market share. Therefore, it is in their interest to send people to websites that they believe will provide a good user experience.
Bounce rate increases by 32% when Google download times increased from 1 to 3 seconds. also the bounce rate increases dramatically after 3 secondswhile page views are also declining, according to Pingdom.
Both statistics are a little old, but there is no evidence to suggest that people are more patient today.
The challenge I see most often with brands is that they design their websites in a way that gets in the way of the “one click or less” goal. They include things like:
- Large videos with autoplay (sometimes with sound).
- Big pictures of heroes which push the informative content far below the mark (add characters spinning through the slideshow and the experience is even worse).
- Custom fonts which most likely were not installed on the local computers of their visitors.
All of these design elements (and others) reduce user experience, conversion optimization, and accessibility standards.
Examples of bad design and UX
Both examples show a movie-strip view of page loads over time on WebPageTest.org, a popular load-time testing site recommended by some Googlers. In both cases, I’m simulating a Galaxy S7 smartphone over an LTE connection.
Charity website
This site has a large autoplay video on the home page that pushes most of the main content below the front page.
In the tests I ran, nothing appeared in the field of view until 3 seconds after loading. The CTA at the top of the page is visible, but only the logo alt text is displayed. Some texts are hard to read because they are light gray; it is intended to be displayed as an overlay on a darker video.
Visitors may even miss that they are on the right site because the logo only appears 4.5 seconds after loading and the alt text is hard to read.
If we believe data from Google and Pingdom, if someone doesn’t tap the CTA at the top of the page, it’s very likely that they’ll bounce before getting that organization’s main message.
Website of a well-known brand

This site has a large main image that pushes the content below the fold and custom font that needs to be downloaded before anything is displayed.
You can see from the example that nothing but the hamburger menu appears until 4 seconds after loading.
Here’s a tip: If you have to include some sort of download timer to let people know something is on the way, it’s overkill.
Part of the reason the content takes so long to render is that the custom font alone takes about 4 seconds to download. No text is displayed until 6 seconds after loading and this is just a cookie notification.
This entire page takes more than 10 seconds to download. When the page loads, the only thing you can see apart from the main image is the cookie notice.
To be fair, there’s a lot more going on in these cases than big videos, huge heroes, and custom fonts. There are also JavaScript and CSS files, third-party tracking, and more that also disrupt download streams. That’s probably a topic for another time.
Why bad UX happens
When I talk to designers and developers about challenges like this, I often get the same justifications:
- “Everyone else designs their websites like this.” That kind of excuse didn’t work when we were kids. Why do some adults think this is still acceptable?
- “Download times are unfairly judged by search engines. Our tools tell us everything is fine.” There are many reasons to believe that search engines are unfair in estimating download times. In the end, it really doesn’t matter. If we want to compete, we have to be faster!
- “But… the brand!” Yes, branding is important. But is it so important to risk losing potential customers because the site is too slow?
Avoid these pitfalls
Our mission is to help our customers, partners, and collaborators create engaging websites that load quickly, meet the expectations of website visitors, and look good at the same time.
This will get you more attention from organic search results and increase your business.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are cited here.
New to search engine land
MY NUMBER 1 RECOMMENDATION TO CREATE FULL TIME INCOME ONLINE: CLICK HERE