How Site Speed Impacts Financial Outcomes

With so many sites offering the same product, online shoppers do not hesitate to move on to a speedier website if your site takes longer to load. Studies have shown that a one second delay in page load time can result in 7% decrease in conversions and 11% lesser page views. Clearly, the research reports show that slower loading websites have a negative impact on the user experience and also have adverse influence on the efficiency of online sales conversions. Site speed is also a search engine ranking factor.  For all these reasons, it is essential to have a faster site.

User Expectations on Site Speed

The internet users in general have little patience for a page that takes too long to load. In this mobile era people are now used to instant messaging and instant communication. How fast your website loads is very important from visitor’s point of view, but often many business owners completely ignore this dimension. In the last few years we have witnessed a phenomenal growth of mobile devices. In fact post 2015, mobile usage has surpassed desktop use. Though desktop is important, it is time to consider mobile first. 

Mobile landing page takes an average time of 22 seconds to load. However, more than half of the customers will leave the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This means you may lose half of your customers even before they visit your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And those who will patiently wait for the page to load may not like return to your site again because of the negative user experience. This is true for the desktop users as well. If the page is slow, abandonment will increase.

There is no surprise that improving site speed can improve customer satisfaction, increase in conversion and obviously revenue growth. 

Positive Branding For a High Performance Site

A high performance site which loads faster than most sites creates a strong positive reaction. Add a dash of aesthetics to the site, it will make a bigger positive impact on visitors. Once a positive experience is created, such a positive branding experience is beneficial in converting the visitor into a customer.

Loss of Visitors to Competitors Due to Slow Performance

No doubt less patient visitors are more demanding but sometimes such visitors offer an opportunity, it is likely such visitors are more likely to made impulse purchases, so a smart business site can tailor to their needs and increase their business. Also, they make quick decisions, so it could lead to quicker sales cycles with such type of visitors. Imagine the consequences of losing such high potential customers to your competition.

Improved Search Engine Ranking Leads to Increased Visitors

Search engines including Google take speed into consideration when ranking sites. Further, mobile users expect that a site will load and work well on their devices just like desktop versions. Most of the time, it is not so.  The search engines are not interested in directing their users to sites that takes too long to load or cannot perform well on the mobile devices. Mobile users’ experience will therefore be a significant factor in terms of ranking. Search engines started ranking search results based on the performance of the mobile versions of websites.  

This ranking benefit for mobile friendly sites is an incentive. It encourages you as website owner to make investments in making the mobile site deliver good speeds to visitors. If you want to best results from your website, you need to know how to reduce the loading time of your website. Your goal should be to create a site that provides best user experience irrespective of the device or screen size. 

How to Improve Your Site Speed?

So far we have understood that it is very essential to have a fast site. However, how do you know where you stand relative to your competitors? One is the use the tools provided by search engines like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. However, that gives a picture of your site at that moment. 

Another key tool is to use a good website monitoring service. Website monitoring enables you to check the performance of your site from multiple servers across the world on a continuous basis. Secondly, it can monitor for both downtime and degradation of performance. Good website monitoring tools can also check if only certain portions of the site are not working. The website monitoring vendor will also provide several convenient methods of informing you about the downtime. This helps you resolve the issue faster and get the site up and running quicker. All these website monitoring features enable you to provide faster site speed and better user experience to your visitor that typically translates into substantial financial outcomes.