This article discusses about the importance of website speed and how your website as well as your business as a whole are affected due to pages on your website taking more time to load.
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Are you tired of seeing the rotation of your browser’s load status icon never stops when you access certain websites. Sometimes the website you are trying to access takes a lot of time to load that your patience is finally run out. How long will you be spending on such a website? Not much time, right?
Yes, the speed of your site has a greater influence on your user’s satisfaction than any extra “bells and whistles”. It doesn’t matter however great your website looks if it takes a lot of time to load, the users will move away.
The stats published by Akamai say that almost 40% of internet users will ignore a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.
First impression is the best impression
It may be a proverb but it’s also a fact. The first impression of the visitor will be negative if the page doesn’t load on time and the person will step backward automatically. Hence you are losing a visitor who could be your potential customer.
Load speed is the base of any great website, and so you need to take it as it is the foundation of your website. If your site is slow, it’s pushing you backward.
Let’s look where all it gets affected.
1. Conversions and Sales
As aforesaid, most people leave a website when it takes more than 3 seconds to load, which is a straight loss of potential clients and thus loss of potential revenue. So, website speed can rigorously influence your conversion rate.
Suppose your website gets 1,000 visitors a month, you could miss 400 of them if your site slows down. You can think how much that will influence your conversion rate! If you’re a small company rivaling for new customers, you can’t afford to slow down. Conversions fall by 12% for every extra second taken for loading and revenue increases by 3.2% if you improve average loading speed from 4 to 2 seconds.
2. From Visitor’s point of view
A slower website will annoy the visitors from the starting itself and that can influence the rest of their time on your site. It is estimated that 47% of users require a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, especially for Ecommerce websites. Website load speed is your first opportunity to give a wonderful user experience. As mentioned it’s all about the first impression, and you only get one chance at it. When a website pops up fastly, you just built your initial positive experience in the user’s thought. And your site may get registered automatically in their mind.
Creating a memorable user experience has a simple formula. Give the visitors what they’re seeking for, and do it as fast as possible! Anything that slows users down or distracts them leads to a poor user experience. When it comes to user’s point of view, Google’s research shows that faster site speed leads to satisfied users, increased productivity, and more time users spend browsing.
3. Low Page Speed Hinder SEO Performance
A slow website is challenging not only for the end-user but also for the website’s SEO. That is, it can make your website to place lower in search engine results. That means your websites visits from search engines get reduced to a great extent and revenue or conversion of the customers from this will be reduced.
While looking through the SEO point of view, Google, Bing, and other search engines use site speed as one of the many factors that decide rank. It’s also applicable both on the desktop and mobile platforms. If your site’s speed isn’t up to level, you may have to face the ranking penalties.
The purpose why site speed is considered by the search engines is because of they want to point users to sites with the best overall appearance and information. Search engine optimization is a keen-witted business. No-one truly knows how Google’s algorithm works except the Google techie heads.
But one thing we at Mizzle know clearly is that Google will not rate and rank slow loading websites highly as Google’s mission is to “make the entire web faster”. It doesn’t mean the website speed is a massive ranking factor, but, yet it is a factor, which Google’s Search Engine head Matt Cutts has openly revealed.
As far as SEO is concerned it is not just the Page speed being a ranking factor, but there is another factor that could hinder your website’s SEO performance if it loads slowly. Google bots will not be getting the right updates about your site and its blogs while crawling. And hence it would affect your SEO rankings.
You are having a website with faster page load doesn’t mean it will be solving all your SEO problems, instead it makes sure that your website is getting crawled and indexed frequently and the website’s page rank is improved.
4. Slow Website cause Higher Bounces Rate
Bounce rate is nothing but how many visitors left your website without clicking on a single link on the site. They might have even left without looking the contents or the products advertised. Sometimes it may be due to the lack of good look and feel or they didn’t find what they were looking for.
Page speed is inversely proportional to the bounce rate. Lower the speed, higher the bounce rate. Your bounce rate is an indication of what the users felt while going through the site, i.e. if your site’s bounce rate is low the visitors of your site are happy and exploring your site. A huge bounce rate implies they’re moving out quickly. It will directly affect your sales, conversion, and SEO as well.
You must now be aware of the importance of Website speed. If your website is loading slower or your users are complaining about the site speed or your website is not performing well in Search Engines, you must get your website optimized to improve the page load time.
If you would like Mizzle to carry out website performance optimization to improve your website speed, contact us now.
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