Have you ever been in a situation where you have done everything needed to build a strong online presence and yet you are not getting the desired results? Your website does not have repeat visitors and no one is buying your products? Have you paid attention to almost every minute detail of your business but still struggle to find the exact reason. One last time you go over through your web reports, and in that miraculous moment, you happen to hit the nail - “Maybe it is because my website performance is miserable”.
Website speed is one of the most overlooked metrics in digital marketing. Sluggish websites lose the interest of visitors, making it difficult for marketers to understand the cause of deteriorating performance. Check out this interesting KISSmetrics' infographic on loading time (click to enlarge).
Fixing website speed is a cumbersome and time consuming activity and hence many developers de-prioritize it. What they do not understand is that because the internet speed and device performance have increased dramatically over the years and continuing to have a poor performing website can only hurt your business prospects.
Here are five reasons why you must upgrade your website performance -
1. Website Speed Creates The First Impression
Time is without a doubt a precious thing. When results are delivered quickly, we become delighted. Undoubtedly, users are impressed by the websites that load fast and are far more likely to stick around.
Below are a few interesting facts about website speed:
- The average time in which a website loads is 2 seconds. (kissmetrics)
- 44 percent of the users would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online. (GlobalDots)
- One second delay in website page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions. (econsultancy)
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year. (Amazon)
2. Page Speed Now One Of Google’s Ranking Factor
So you have directed all your efforts towards hiring an SEO expert, spent countless hours improving the meta tags, descriptions, headings etc., but forgot about the page load time? To impress Google, you not only need to have all that we have just mentioned but also have to play by Google’s page speed rules for increasing your page speed and improving the user experience. It is very simple, the higher your website speed, the better are your chances of ranking higher.
3. Upward Trend in Mobile Usage
Mobile devices account for 49.7 percent of web page views worldwide and this number is supposed to grow sevenfold between 2016 to 2021. (Statistica) What does this mean? You can no longer use the same approach to create a mobile version of your website. Dump the same codes and start digging deep into finding ways to streamline your mobile site to load within two seconds or less.
4. User experience
Users expect speed and a great experience. If your website does not perform well, the user will quickly jump to a competitor website. Perceptions once created are not easy to change. Not only will you lose a sale this time, but all other future sales.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less (kissmetrics)
- Users begin to drop off a site when its response time is longer than 2.5 seconds (Forrester)
5. Conversions and Sales
Recently Google has upgraded its site speed tool to tell you how many visitors you may lose due to poor page loading speed and how your website performs in comparison to the industry. The better the user experience is, the higher your sales will be. Use this link to test your site’s speed: https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb
Conclusion
In short, website speed should be a high priority when building great websites. If you find that your website is slow, don’t lose time in identifying the problem and stop losing customers. Look at your site’s loading speed and act now. Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.
We hope this article helps in bringing out the significance of why website speed matters like never before. If you have any questions at all or if you want to know more about our digital marketing or website design and development services, click here.
This post focussed on 5 reasons why website speed is important. If you have any other reason why website speed matters, feel free to post your comments below. We will be more than happy to include them.
