If you haven’t yet checked your website’s speed at Google’s PageSpeed Insights, stop now and click the link. It only takes a minute, and your business depends on it.

All done? Good job. Here’s why we asked you to do that.

Page speed is already quite significant to how your window and door or window coverings website gets ranked in organic search. But this metric is about to become imperative.

With people now researching home improvement services more on mobile devices than on desktop computers, Google is putting far more emphasis on the mobile experience.

That’s the rationale behind its mobile-first index, which means how your website displays and works on mobile is prioritized over how it displays and works on the desktop.

In July, Google will make page speed—how quickly content loads when someone visits your website—a critical factor in how it ranks your site. If your page speed is too low, your website is in deep trouble.

One reason we’re so concerned about this is because so many independent home improvement businesses have outsourced website development to marketing firms that don’t act ethically.

They ignore mobile and page speed optimization, and when they’re confronted with that fact, they don’t bother doing anything about it. They already got paid, so they feel no obligation to help.

Come July, this is the sort of problem that can do serious damage to your local search rankings and conversions on your home improvement website. Because even if page speed were not important to Google, it most definitely is to today’s window and door and window coverings consumers.

Slow website speed kills conversions. According to a survey by Kissmetrics, about half of visitors now expect website content to load in two seconds or less. More than 40 percent of visitors will abandon a website if the content takes more than three seconds to load.

That’s where consumer expectations are in 2018. Three seconds might not sound slow at first, but try counting out those seconds (one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand) when you first visit a website. You’ll appreciate how slow that feels in modern terms.

Per the survey, every extra second it takes for content to load reduces conversions about 7 percent. So if your content takes three seconds longer to load than it should, you’re losing more than 20 percent of potential conversions on your home improvement site.

So now you know you need to act fast on page speed for your home improvement website to be successful. What do you do first?

You can’t fix a problem until you know exactly what it is, so click the following link for Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This free tool will determine your site’s page speed and provide recommendations on how to improve it.

Once you have that information, take it to your webmaster/site developer. You want strong speed and optimization scores for both mobile and desktop.

If your developer is not willing to help you with that, consult with a knowledgeable, reputable online marketing firm for help. This speed problem needs to be rectified with the utmost speed!