Speed of the internet is considered as the determining factor for most of the audience since it enables the user to take decision whether to stay on the page or to leave the page. Many surveys have shown that the average time a visitor spends on single site is 3 minutes, if your site does not completely load in 3 minutes, he will definitely switch to another site which means that you are loosing a valuable customer. In order to prevent such things, your page load time should be in seconds. Let us see what is page load time and how it affects the ranking of the page.
Page load time is the time taken by the server to respond to the request made by the visitor, i.e., whatever the user requests like entering a search work, reload, returning to the previous page etc. The time in which the page completely loads considering the request by the user is called as page load time. The lesser the page load time the faster the page gets loaded and hence the visitor gets satisfied browsing your website.
The search engines have been using this page load time in their page rank algorithm from long time. That means the site which loads faster is ranked high and hence can be viewed by most number of people.
For instance, let us take the search engine giant Google. It measures page load time in two ways. The first is using googlebot, which is the program that crawls websites for indexes. It measures how fast your site is responding to the googlebot in order to rank it. The second technique is comparing your page loading time with the page loading time of your competitors.
So depending on the page rank given by the search engines you have to optimize your website in order to rank better than your competitors, so that maximum traffic will be received by your site which increases your revenue.