When you click on a website, how long do you wait for it to display before clicking on something else?Would you wait two minutes? How long do you think your customers are going to wait?
Google feels this is important as well, and part of your site ranking depends on speed.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is an HTML Framework that works to help web pages run faster on mobile devices. It was originally created by Google, but became its own open source project. Google has made it one of their factors when it comes to page ranking.
Everyone lives in Google’s world right now, so if Google feels that AMP and speed are important; AMP and speed are important.
But as far as evil overlords go, Google has been nice. They released control of AMP, so the AMP Open Source Project can make their own standards. Google provides tools to help developers test their site; and it isn’t hard to implement, most of the time.
Their are many technical details that go into AMP that are beyond the scope of what I can cover here. There are also many ways to implement AMP and some methods require more technical skill than others.
There are some basic things to consider with site speed and AMP.
The first is to test your domain google has provided testing tools to determine how well your site does.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
It is important to test your site regularly to determine performance.
If your site has AMP implemented; but fails the speed test, site code and server capacity are the two main areas of focus.
Server speed usually must be bought. Most web hosting companies will use a shared server for all of the domains it manages. This means that at certain times, when server capacity is high, the server may be slow to respond. At times of low capacity the server will be fast. For websites that need to be fast all the time, most hosting companies offer private servers that allow admins to manage the server directly, have dedicated hard drive space, and dedicated ram.
Site Code is something that can be managed directly on the website. How one implements this, depends on how the existing site has been created. This is not something the average person can do, but you can test your site to see how well it does. A good web designer should be able to redesign it to conform to the latest standards.