Why You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain By Not Optimizing Your Website Speed

You thought you did everything perfectly while setting up your website. You hired that graphic designer to put together an eye popping design that would wow even the most casual of browsers. You paid for top notch content to be put up on your website by one of the best copywriters you could find. Heck, maybe you even splashed out a few dollars on targeted Adwords and Facebook ads to get people coming to your site. But your website simply isn’t drawing the traffic or sales that you anticipated.

All because you forgot one critical part of your website design: Your website load speed.

While you may be doubtful that 1 or 2 seconds of extra website loading time doesn’t count, think again: the time it takes for your website to load is literally one of the top considerations for any website. Let’s walk you through the reasons why you’re throwing your money down the drain by not optimizing your website load speed:

You lose potential customers

Think about this frightening statistic: almost half of all website visitors expect a website to load within 2 seconds or less. In fact, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of potential customers will abandon your site. These surprising facts come from a study that examined site speed and other important metrics on ecommerce sites. In a business world where a 1 or 2 percent swing in customer numbers can make a huge difference to your business, that’s a sobering statistic. And the customer loss extends even beyond casual shoppers. Over half of all respondents in the study stated that the site load speed was an important factor in how loyal they are to shopping on that site, and almost two thirds (64%) of will go to a competing site rather than face the agony of dealing with a site with slow load speeds.

You lose sales

With slow loading times, you’re missing out on the sales from the people who do stick around for more than a few seconds. For example, in the same study mentioned above, it was found that almost a quarter (23%) of all shoppers will simply either stop shopping or literally walk away from the computer if the site takes too long to load even after they had begun to shop. At peak traffic times when shoppers are even less patient, the story is far worse. Over 75% of customers will leave a site they are shopping on for another one rather than continue to suffer delays during peak online shopping times. Even the tiniest of delays costs company sales, as retail giant Amazon realised in their study that showed that for every extra 100 milliseconds, their website sales decreased by 1%. These figures show that even fractions of a second count when optimizing page loading times.

Your SEO takes a beating

Slow website load speeds results in bad Search Engine Optimization rankings. Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is a critical consideration of any website because of the importance of search engines such as Google and Bing. The higher your website is ranked in search rankings, the more clicks and views you’ll get, and therefore the more clients will come your way. Popular search engine sites such as Google use site load speed to determine how well you rank. The slower your site is, the more your site will be penalized in the search engine rankings, and the fewer views your website will receive.

Customers lose faith in your business

It’s crystal clear that having a slow website load speed negatively impacts customer’s perception of not only the website, but the brand itself. Website load speed is an integral part of the user experience, and if your website simply cannot load in time then the user experience suffers greatly. Almost half (48%) of all customers report that if a website takes too long to load, that they take that as an indication that the business simply does not care about them. In other words, the perception of your business as a whole suffers if your website loads too slowly.

The solution for optimizing your website

Thankfully, you don’t have to suffer through slow site speeds. In fact, there are plenty of easy ways to work on your website if it loads too slowly. From compressing the images on your website to optimizing plugins and WordPress templates, your website can be fine-tuned to give you the fast site load times that you deserve and that your customers will love. Don’t underestimate the importance of fast load times for your website – speed up your website today.