Your Slow Website is Losing Customers
The importance of speed when it comes to engaging and retaining site users.
Today — over half of all website traffic comes from mobile devices, which has influenced some big changes in the web development world such as The Speed Update by Google in July 2018.
One of the red flags that website owners need to be aware of, is that the speed of your website can and will impact your business. The speed of a website is the responsibility of the developer, the designer and the marketing personnel.
If you’re still asking, is the speed of my website really that important for converting customers? Well — check the facts: 53% of mobile visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load (Google), and according to Ericsson ConsumerLab, the level of stress caused by mobile delays is comparable to that of watching a horror movie or standing at the edge of a virtual cliff — yikes.
If customers have a frustrating, or annoying experience with your website, they may never come back. The fact of the matter is, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. And at the moment, about 70% of mobile landing pages take longer than 7 seconds to fully load (Google) — which is unfortunately, too long for today’s users.
The real questions you should be asking are: Is my website fast enough? And, does my website meet modern web performance standards? One quick thing that website owners can do right now, is test the speed and mobile performance of their site, using these free tools: Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights.
There are a number of ways to achieve these new industry benchmarks for site speed such as compressing images, implementing responsive design, avoiding or hiding videos for mobile users, “minifying code”, or even adopting a CDN.
However, if site owners are considering a long-term, modern solution — they might take in to consideration what some of todays largest brands such as Spotify, Pinterest, Twitter, BMW and the New York Times, are doing. The modern, and current ‘future-proof’ solution for mobile performance, and speed optimizations is converting websites in to Progressive Web Applications — a device neutral fusion of traditional websites and native applications, and consolidating their code with Google’s AMPhtml.
