For small, local business owners, having a mobile-ready website that loads quickly is vital to staying on top of local search results and attracting new customers.

While three seconds does not sound like a long time, mobile shoppers who have limited data plans are not going to wait for more than three to four seconds while a slow loading website renders. When people become impatient, they hit the back button and move on to a competitor’s website, which gives slow loading mobile websites a high bounce rate.

Wanting to give users the best possible experience, Google rewards websites that load quickly with a higher position in local searches. Google’s mobile best practices suggest mobile sites should load content above the fold in one second on 3G networks. To meet the one second goal, Google created AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) open-source framework, where Google caches pages on their server, producing lightening fast page loads.

As larger companies adopt AMP, users expect every website to load quickly on their mobile device, leaving small local business owners who depend on business from local searches scrambling make their sites load faster, while including the interactive features that visitors expect. Google offers actionable recommendations for page load optimization, including:

A fast loading mobile-friendly website is key to ranking near the top of Google’s local search results, however, a great user experience is necessary to keep visitors on the site long enough to convert. Since many load speed optimizations are complex, local business owners typically turn to web developers to amp up their website load speed without impairing the user’s experience.

Simple. Just go to Pingdom and enter the URL for the page you want to test:

https://tools.pingdom.com/

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