Is Your Slow Website Killing Your Business?
Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes
By: Brian McCracken
High Level Developer
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KEY
POINTS
- Poor site speed costs businesses billions of dollars a year in lost revenue.
- Many users will leave a site or abandon their attempt to visit it if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- There are free tools available online the can help you evaluate your website’s speed and improve it.
Before we go any further, I think we can all agree that few things are as frustrating as trying to visit a website that loads slowly, and sometimes not at all.
People trying to visit your website that may have become new customers will probably abandon it and go to your competitor to complete their purchase instead. The larger problem is that they will remember that poor experience and are unlikely to ever return to your website again.
Advantages of Improving Your Site Speed
Improved User Experience
A fast website improves your customers’ experience with your website, and therefore your brand.
- 47% of users expect a website to load in two seconds or less.
- 73% of mobile users say that they’ve encountered websites that were too slow to load.
- 40% of people abandon websites that take longer than three seconds to load.
The take away is that if your website is slow, your customers are going to go elsewhere.
Increased Leads & Sales
If your website is too slow to load and people leave, you will miss out on all those potential sale opportunities.
However, even if someone does make it to your website, if it is frustrating and slow to use, they are far less likely to complete a sale or fill out a form. HubSpot found that reducing the loading time of a website increases sales and leads by three to seventeen percent.
If your website sells products, and you do roughly $5,000 in sales a day, that means you are losing out on $1.25 million in revenue every year.
Increased Website Traffic
Search engines like Google prioritize websites that load quickly. Faster loading websites provide users with positive experiences, and search engines want to be known for providing the best results to their users.
If your website is slower than your competitors, they may have a chance to use it as a ranking factor to place higher in search results than you, taking that traffic away from you.
On the other hand, if your site is faster than theirs, you may be the one with increased traffic, and generally speaking, more traffic means more sales or leads.
Testing Your Website’s Speed
Fortunately we’ve put together a resource full of tools you can use to test your website’s speed.
Ideally, you want your website to load in 2-3 seconds or less. If it takes longer than that to load, you will want to address it.
Google has put together a very good resource to help you understand what may be contributing to your website’s speed scores.
How To Improve Your Website’s Speed
Improving your website’s speed will be a joint effort involving your web developer and your host.
A full-service, skilled web developer can optimize your website’s underlying code, images, and files to perform better. They may do things like:
- Reduce the number of plugins used on your site
- Minify your HTML and CSS
- Compress images
- Reduce redirects
- Build a custom theme and blocks for your site instead of a page builder that may be hurting your performance
High-quality, managed hosting will also be important in helping ensure that your website loads quickly. Managed hosting services utilize advanced caching and CDNs to ensure that your customers have a good experience on your site, leading to more traffic, sales, and leads.
Do You Think Your Slow Site Might be Hurting Your Business?
PageSpeed Optimization can be a large undertaking, but we do it all the time. Let’s see if we can help!
