Do you know how much your page time speed matters to your business?
How fast your site loads can impact every part of your business. It can impact marketing and branding, lead generation, and sales.
Focusing on your website’s load time can help you improve your brand’s image in the mind of visitors. There are a host of reasons why your site’s page speed can have a big impact on your business.
Read on to learn why you need to work on the page speed of your site, and what you can do to speed it up.
Page Load Time Impacts SEO
Google and search engines have one job. That’s to deliver the best search results to their users. The more people use Google to search for information, the more the company gets for advertising revenue. Google relies on eyeballs and advertising revenue to operate.
Therefore, it’s invested in making sure the search engine produces the best results.
In 2010, Google introduced websites’ page time speed as one of its many ranking factors to give the best results to their users.
What does that mean for you? The amount of time it takes for your site to load matters. Your site needs to be fast to rank high in search results.
People Will Leave Your Site
We now live in a world where we expect things to happen instantly. We want our food fast, our service fast, we don’t want to sit in traffic, and we don’t want to wait for a website to load.
You work hard to get the word out about your business. You invest in marketing, SEO, and you spent time crafting the marketing messages on your website.
A website that loads slowly could waste those efforts. People will not bother to stay on your site to read about your business. You do have a chance to convince them how amazing your business is. They already left your site before they could even learn more about your business.
Page Speed Leads to Higher Conversion Rates
There are a lot of factors that lead to higher conversion rates. The content of your landing page, the web site’s design, your offer, the headlines of the page all play a role in conversions.
Even if you get these variables to be perfect, you could still have a low conversion rate.
That could be due to your site’s page speed. Your site’s speed has a direct impact on conversion rates. Cloudflare noted that a site that takes 2.4 seconds to load has a 1.9% conversion rate.
That same site could take 3.3 seconds to load. The conversion rate drops to 1.5%.
It’s a Mobile World
Think about how people access information today. About 52% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. That number is only going to increase.
People on mobile devices tend to have slower connections, such as 3G. You’d assume that people would be willing to wait for a mobile site to load. Google has noted that mobile conversions are less on mobile sites than desktop. That’s likely because mobile sites take too long to load.
That’s not the case at all. On average, people will wait about 3 seconds for a site to load before abandoning the site.
Your site is unlikely to meet this benchmark. Most sites Google analyzed take between 5-7 seconds to load.
Think about that. If half of your traffic comes from mobile, how much traffic are you losing because of a slow loading website?
Page Speed Impacts Your Brand
Your website is often the first place people go to research your company. If it takes too long for your website to load, customers will have a negative impression of your company.
They may not bother to do business with you, nor will they want to return. About 79% of users who have a poor online shopping experience are unlikely to return to your site for a second purchase.
Your business will then depend on generating new customers, instead of retaining customers. That’s not a sustainable business in the long run.
Page Time Affects Your Bottom Line
You’ve seen the evidence so far that outlines why page speed is critical to your business. It can impact your brand, your conversion rates, and your site’s SEO.
The most important thing to note is that page speed impacts your bottom line. Amazon did a study on the correlation between page time and sales. They found that they were losing up to $1.6 billion in sales.
You may think that because you’re not a billion dollar company, a slow website won’t matter. The truth is that a slow loading website will cost you business.
One study found that if you make $100,000 a day from your website, a delay of one second could cost your company $2.5 million a year.
Can you afford to sustain such losses over time? How would that amount of money impact your business?
That’s why you need to look at your site’s speed and make sure that it doesn’t take too long to load.
Site Speed Matters. What Can You Do About It?
Your site’s page speed matters to your business. For every millisecond it takes to load your site, people can lose patience and leave. That can cost your business money in the long run.
Fortunately, there is something that you can do about it. You can take the time yourself to become a website programmer and speed up your page time. Chances are, you have better things to do, like run your business.
You could hire a team of experts to handle your website for you. We offer website design packages that optimize your site for speed.
Would you like to know more? Contact us today to find out how we can help your website and your bottom line.
