A study created by Akamai states that around 50% of internet users want a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and if that doesn’t happen, they will move on to a new one. As a result, it’s very important for any business to have a fast-loading website with great performance and a stellar user experience. Sometimes HTTP Requests can take up 80% of the web page load time and in many instances, it can be the image sizes that result in increasing load times for websites. The responsibility tends to lie with development and optimisation teams to work to establish exactly which factors are slowing down the performance of your website. Let’s look further at the impact slow websites can have for your business.
As mentioned recently by my colleague, Alex, the speed in which your website loads is a critical factor in creating that first impression with the user of your website. As you can imagine, a very fast load speed reflects that your business cares about its online presence and user experience. A slow website will make users assume that any possible transaction will not be secure and will also impact upon the visitor returning. Research has been conducted which reflects that 79% of online shoppers will not return to a website that takes a long time to load.
Not only that, but we live in the age of high speed fibre super speed WiFi, and subsequently, shorter attention spans. Technology has sped up just about everything as far as digital is concerned and the challenge right now is to actively use that idea to fully optimise the speed of your company’s website. If your site fails to load immediately upon request, exit rates will soar, with this detrimental performance negatively impacting upon overall performance and potential conversions resulting. Let’s look at this further.
Major sites such as Amazon, for example, noticed that whenever their site experiences latency, they lose a lot of money. In fact, 100ms of latency costs their business up to 1% in sales, which may not sound like a lot of money, but it really does add up why is why your website requires a strong infrastructure and optimisation to ensure quick loading speeds. The more content you add to it, the harder your website will have to work and longer load speeds will be incurred if no action is taken to optimise the site. Constant optimisation is therefore, without question, mandatory if you to maintain or increase conversion rates.
If there are any pitfalls in conversion rates, website conversion rate optimisation specialists and UX designers will look towards tinkering with the website to improve user experience to make it easier for customers to reach goals with ease. That being said, making changes to the structure or design of a website can be in vain if not providing users with speed of access across the website in the first instance.
Every website owner wants their site to perform well for SEO within Google’s search index. Appearing higher in the search results can work to generate increased traffic, exposure and ultimately, conversions. Your website speed is a major ranking factor for search engines so if your site renders slowly, it is unlikely that your website will be positioned favourably by prominent search engines such as Google.
As outlined within this post, website speed is critical for your business. As a business, you have a responsibility to your customers not only to deliver great on-page user experiences, but to deliver your content in the fastest way possible.
Why not test your website speed for free today? Some great tools for doing this are:
If your website loads slowly, we would encourage you to consider making the necessary optimisations immediately. If you require support with optimising your website; whether it be on the speed front or anything else, please contact our team today.