Having an effective website is about so much more than just a pretty design. The criteria for a good website are ever evolving.

Starting next month google will start putting even more emphasis on load time, time to interactivity, and overall user experience. This means that if your website isn’t complying with the new rules, google may see your site as less than desirable and drop you in rankings. So what do these criteria mean?

Load Time

Load time refers to the overall time it takes for your website to load. As mentioned in other posts, having a low load time can determine whether someone even decides to stay on your website. Longer load times may lead to frustration and higher bounce rates. Load times longer than 4-5 seconds start to experience a larger increase in bounce rates. There are many practices that can help get load time down to optimal levels.

Time to Interactivity

Time to interactivity simply means how long it takes before the user can interact with your site. Well built websites load their content in priority of what the user should be experiencing and interacting with first. Lots of poorly built sites will have sites that have high time to interactive sites because items well below the area of the users initial experience on the page are spending precious seconds loading. Optimize your site to load only the most important items first so your time to interactivity is as low as possible.

Overall User Experience

Overall user experience is a criteria google is focusing more and more on. This simply means what is it like being on your website? Is it easy to use? Easy to navigate? Are there any things on your site that may take away from the experience, that may be unexpected, or even annoy your users? Examples of this can include broken links, a lack of call to actions or contact information, deceiving links or content that are clearly there to trick the user in some way into doing something, certain popups, malware, and more.

What’s Next?

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what google will be implementing next month. And they’re constantly implementing changes like this. Building a website isn’t static…it’s ever evolving and so are the criteria for what’s deemed a good website. So for the best possible return on your money when building a website, opt for a professional web developer. They will almost always be worth the initial investment over other options such as do it yourself website builders or overseas so called “web designers”.

Contact us to get more information about how Bracha Designs can help get your website up to speed and ready for Google’s next big update.