Website Performance and its Strategic Importance

When it comes to customer expectations regarding website performance, they are mainly looking for high performance. Therefore not being able to have a fast loading and quickly responding website can adversely impact a business in many ways.

Slow Sites Lead to Lost Revenue

Most people tend to expect a web page load in as little time as possible. Therefore slower page loading times can lead to enhanced page abandonment. It has been discovered that about 40% of users would most likely abandon a web page provided it failed to load within 2 to 3 seconds. This is even more prominent for e-commerce sites that can potentially experience loss of revenue even with a page delay of one second. This lost revenue due to slow websites is a very high value for highly popular e-commerce sites.

A Google study conducted in 2015 shows that if an app or website takes a lot of time to load, 29% of smartphone owners immediately shift to a different website for satisfying their needs. Among the ones who switch, about 70% do so due to slow loading times.

On the other hand, it has also been seen that improvements in loading time boosts the conversion rates for an e-commerce website. This could boost both the top-line and bottom-line.

Degraded Site Performance Reduces Long Term Loyalty of Customers

Poor digital performance is one of the main reasons why many companies fail to retain their customers in the long term. Moreover, about 75% of online users who have experienced issues with a site that is too slow, freezes and crashes or incorporates a rather complicated checkout process are not going to visit that site or buy things from it in the future. Another study revealed that when certain web pages got slowed down for about 12 weeks, they took almost 6 weeks to achieve their normal traffic levels.

Reputational Damage from Slowly Loading Websites

Poor web experiences can result in customers getting frustrated and they are also likely to share such negative experiences with their friends and family. Some of the customers may even use various social media channels to offer their negative reviews. Such bad reviews can make the website lose a lot of potential customers who tend to shy away due to the negativity associated with the site.

Higher Costs for Running a Customer Service

A poorly performing website can also negatively impact the budget of the company since more resources will be required for problem solving as customers call in to complain about the obstacles that they face while using a site.

Productivity Losses

Poorly performing websites not only put a major strain on the web admin team but they can also hamper employee productivity in a major way. Once the website goes down, then resources are typically borrowed from other teams to diagnose the issue, resolve it or test the fix. It has been found that outages of the IT department cost companies around $700 billion every year, out of which about 78% is caused by poor productivity. From these facts, we can extrapolate that even with website downtime also productivity losses are incurred by the business sites.

Making use of a good website monitoring service can help to identify and quickly resolve the downtime of the site. In addition to that, a good monitoring service can help ensure that a business consistently delivers a positive experience for the end users. The many advantages that this positive experience can deliver to a website have been already outlined.