Is Your Website Robbing Your Business of Leads or Sales?
Sounds impossible, right?
Nope, this happens every second of everyday.
How? well….
It’s your page speed, silly.
40% Abandon a Site if it Doesn’t Load in 3 Seconds!
3 seconds sounds like a long time for a page to load, yet a reasonable time to wait as well. For arguments sake, if your site loads on average at 3.1 seconds and you make $10 per user who enters your site. If you trim your load time down to 1 second you could increase your revenue by $4 per user. That is a lot of profit.
Google says bounces increase exponentially based on the page load times:
Per Google, the optimal page load time appears to be 1 second and under.
Why Your Page Load Speed Matters To Your Business
Think about page load speed as someone’s first impression of your business. Imagine they walk into your store of office and see you or the people in the office or store moving at a turtle’s pace. What would they think? I am skeptical their instant judgment of your business would be good. On top of that, would they want to do business with you? Being slow, depending on the business, cannot help.
Looking at the other way…
Website loads quickly would give people a strong first impression. It is a quick win and makes your business professional, reliable and trustworthy right off the bat.
We normally do not get 2nd chances!
A Couple of Rules of Thumb For Your Website:
- Give the people what they want
- Give them what they want FAST
Amazon did a famous test on their site speed. They discovered if they were to increase their page speed by 1 second, they would lose $1.6 Billion of revenue. This test was several years ago. Nowadays, it may be more like $16 Billion in revenue considering their traffic and revenue now.
Slow Sites = Decreasing Margins
Bold claim, so let’s get into it.
Outside of less leads or customers for your business there are other considerations for having a slow site. Google penalizes sites for their slow speeds on multiple platforms. On search, it has now started pushing down slow sites. On Google Ads, high bounce rates (which slow site speeds contribute to) decrease quality score.
So how does that decrease margins? If you are getting traffic from organic search you will either start seeing decreased traffic due to your ranking dropping. If you run google ads, then you will see decreased traffic and more expensive clicks from a slower site.
Either way, less is less.
11 Interesting Stats About Page Load Speeds
- 53% of people will abandon your website if it takes 3 seconds to load
- 47% of people expect page loads of 2 seconds or less
- 7% reduction in conversions per 1 second load time increase
- 77% of mobile websites take 10 seconds or more to load
- 73% of mobile users encountered at least 1 website that took too long to load
- 10% lost users for every 1 second extra of page load speed on the BBC’s sites
- 1% increase in revenue for every 100ms of time Walmart shaved off their page load times
- 70% more time and 60% more page views spent on websites that load quickly.
- 10.5% increase in orders and 27% increase in conversions when AliExpress increased their page loads by 36%
- 25% fewer searches for every 500ms delay on Google’s load times
- 2.8% drop in revenue (for Bing) for every 1 second delay.
How Do I Check My Page Load Speed?
There are lots of resources to use here. The ones I use are Pingdom Tools and Google PageSpeed Insights.
Just enter your site into one or both of those searches and check your results. I use them both to verify the results and make sure they are saying the same thing.
What Do I Do If My Website Is Slow?
There are lots of things! Google and Pingdom both provide lots of options for you depending on the CMS you use or the framework you built your site with. Easiest things would be to compress images and use a CDN to deliver your images & content. Both would help you immediately. There are lots of other options, both those are the easier and non-technical options to use.
Now, if you are not in love with your site you could start from scratch and rebuild using different hosting and CMS. This option may be the best for you as you would get a better, faster, stronger site. Allow you stay competitive and keep your current traffic.
Conclusion
Your site and all the pages on your site need to load fast. All of the infrastructure you use for your site matters. Specifically, your hosting, DNS, CDN, image compression, CMS and the code deployed on the site.
Thinking about rebuilding your website from scratch and not sure where to start? Schedule a free 30 minute consultation with Happy Monday Marketing here to help evaluate your needs and allow us to point you in the right direction.
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