Website Downtime Isn’t Your Business’s Only Enemy

If you think that website downtime is your business’s only enemy, you’re sorely mistaken. Slowdowns and performance issues can be just as detrimental to your bottom line. Just how important is the performance of your website to its profits and success? You may be surprised.

The Three Second Rule

According to a recent study, it was discovered that nearly half of all consumers expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If a site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, about 40 percent of consumers will abandon it. To make matters worse, nearly 80 percent of web shoppers say that they won’t return to a site if they have had a bad experience with the performance of the site while visiting.

Word of Mouth Can Be Good or Bad

If you take word-of-mouth advertising seriously, which you should, you should know that almost half of web consumers say that they would tell a friend if they had a bad experience at an online store. Negative word-of-mouth advertising can have just as much of an impact on your business as positive referrals. If you don’t want to be known as the site that doesn’t perform, you need to get your ducks in a row.

Understanding the Big Picture

If your website is profit driven, these numbers are very concerning. If a picture paints a thousand words, these numbers speak volumes. The bottom line is this – if your website isn’t performing the way it should be, your site is losing money. Every minute of downtime equates to dollars lost. On that same note, every minute that your site experiences performance issues can equate to lost customers who will never come back again.

What Can You Do to Protect Your Business?

If the numbers above are any indication, priority number one for your site shouldn’t just be avoiding website downtime. You need to take decreasing the load times of your website pages just as seriously. How can you decrease the load time of your website pages? First and foremost, make sure all of your pages are properly optimized. That means compressing all images and getting rid of unnecessary script. The less data a page has to load, the faster the page will load for the end user. Making sure that your site’s pages are efficient and effective needs to be one of your primary goals if you take the profitability of your website seriously.

Put Website Monitoring to Work for You

If you’re serious about the profits and reputation of your website, you also need to monitor the performance of your site. That means utilizing the services of a quality website monitor. If your website monitor is alerting you of performance issues, you need to address them just as quickly and as seriously as if they were advising you of an outage. A quality website monitor may be the most powerful tool in your arsenal against site performance issues and website downtime. Make sure you are using one. If you’re not, your bottom line is eventually going to feel the impact.