Website Speed and Its Impact on Your Business
Getting a website is a critical part of a lot of businesses. There are plenty of platforms to choose from website construction. Some of the most common include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. But no matter what platform you select, website speed is an issue.
A website that quickly loads provides a better browsing experience for the user. Online user activity shows that website pages that load fast are more likely to “engage” the customer – boosting company brand awareness and increasing the probability of purchase on the website.
“The ideal page load time for a website is less than 3 seconds – with Google suggesting that a site that loads in less than 1.5 seconds is a fast website.”
Here are some interesting facts about how page load times can impact your user engagement:
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load;
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less;
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load; and
- 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.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the many different ways a slow website can impact your business.
- Deteriorating user experience
- Increase in bounce rate
- Fall in search engine ranking
- Loss of traffic
- Impact on revenue collection
Deteriorating user experience
Studies show that if it takes more than 3 seconds to load a page, 40% of users are known to abandon a site. That way, a slow website causes you to lose clients and potential customers even before they have an opportunity to learn about the service you have.
“The effect of slow page loading is even more severe for eCommerce websites. Slow websites lead to higher bounce rates and abandonment of shopping carts.”
Back in 2013, Amazon lost $66,240 every minute in a 30 minutes downtime episode. It’s been assumed that the giant retailer could lose up to $1.6 billion in sales due to a second’s delay in speed.
Your e-commerce site (or any other website) may not be as large as Amazon, but if your website loads slowly, you will still incur losses.
A fast website offers the visitor a feeling of moving toward their goal. The quicker they move towards their goal, the more they feel satisfied. The exact opposite is real, too. Slow websites lead to a decline in user satisfaction due to poor user experience.
This decline is evident in a variety of aspects. For e-commerce websites, many cart abandonment should be a sign. Increased bounce rates is another sign both for eCommerce and other sites.
Increase in bounce rate
Neil Patel, the internet guru, defines bounce rate as – when someone visits your website and leaves without further engaging with your site, a “bounce” occurs.
The reasons why a visitor leaves (or bounces off) a web page too soon can be traced back to the performance of the site. Google’s report found that a second’s delay could increase the bounce rate by more than 100%. Unfortunately, it can take up to 22 seconds for the average website to appear correctly on the browser.
There are a lot of resources you can use to learn what the bounce rate on your website is. But Google Analytics is the most commonly preferred tool. It helps you to find out if your website is experiencing a bounce rate spike, meaning more and more users are leaving your site without engaging with the website.
Page loading time and the probability of bounce. Image credit: Google
Google tests ‘interaction’ by the number of pages the visitor views. A user who visits two pages indicates he is interacting with the site. But if most visitors leave without looking at more than one page of your website, it is a sign that something is wrong like your website is facing performance issues like slow loading speed. This will affect your search engine ranking directly.
Fall in search engine ranking
Anyone who published something on the internet is hoping someone will visit it. But the internet is a highly competitive space. Only the web pages on the first page that appear on the search engine (like Google) draw visitors. You must have noticed it yourself! When you Google for something, do you ever scroll down and open the websites that appear on the search engine on the second or third page? Most likely, no.
Thus, you need to rank high on the search engines if you want an audience. Each website tries to top the other and attempts to climb higher for a better position. Many factors cause websites to rank high, and website speed is one of them.
Fast websites can sometimes get slow due to reasons such as heavy themes, the use of unnecessary plugins, the site being hacked, etc. When your site speed falls, so does your ranking.
When visitors are leaving your website quickly, search engines take it as a factor to rank your site. It is an indication that visitors are not pleased with your website, probably due to the unsatisfactory experience with the users. Google and other search engines want the best web experience for their users. If your website can not deliver such an experience, it either fails to rank, or your site will fall its current ranking.
Loss of Traffic
A fall in search engine ranking inevitably results in a fall in traffic. The lower your website appears in the search engine, the less traffic that it attracts.
As we mentioned in the previous section, websites which hold the first few positions in Google Search (or any other search engine) draw the most significant amount of traffic.
This is especially distressing for e-commerce websites, as low traffic translates into low sales. Studies show that 79% of online shoppers who are unhappy with a website never come back to the site.
Image Source: Apache Booster
Even if you don’t run an e-commerce site, drop-in visitors mean fewer people learn about your business. The whole point of creating a website for your company is to encourage people to visit the site and learn about your work or the service you provide. But if a slow website prevents you from accessing your site, then the intention of creating a website for your company is defeated!
Impact on revenue collection
The e-commerce market has been witnessing tremendous growth over the last few years. Every day, more and more e-commerce websites are created. Although it’s simpler than ever to create an e-commerce website, selling goods and making money remains a challenge.
It’s much worse for e-commerce websites, as the company relies solely on the website. Regardless of whether it’s an e-commerce site or not, when your website undergoes performance issues, customers leave, reducing the revenue collection of the site.
The Bottom Line
As a business, optimizing the value of your website is critical. To do so, you need to check the website performance across several metrics – one of which is the loading time of web pages.
If you need help reviewing/optimizing your website, Contact Us for an obligation-free discussion. No website is the same, and the goals will also be different.