Nothing kills website traffic faster than a slowly loading speed. Turns out that the healthy relationship between influx of users, conversion rates, and sales on the website begins to fall apart the moment there is as much as a second delay over the average 3-seconds page load time.
Beyond that, people tend to leave the site and abandon purchases, never to return. For any highly competitive market, this does not bode well for a business. Which is why, in this article, we will highlight five reasons why you need to pay attention to your page load speed.
Short Attention Spans
Sure, technology is getting advanced and things should be easier, right? But no, the world keeps getting busier. No one wants to waste precious minutes to get through whatever content they want to access. It is quite easy to visit other websites with similar information served in record time.
In fact, previous studies show that an average human’s attention span online can be shorter than that of a goldfish. According to statistics, human interest begins to pale once there is a delay that goes beyond 8 seconds.
Good User Experience
Control is an integral part of human’s nature that never fades away. Statistics show that users that face slow speeds have the feeling of losing control over the situation at hand.
This, of course, means that it is only natural for users to tackle anything that makes them feel that way by seeking alternatives. Many users take the easier route out by walking away from the site. What is more, they’d often go to direct competitors.
Additionally, if visitors leave a site en masse, this signals to search engines that the content offered doesn’t match users’ expectations. Quite often, such user behavior leads to lower positions in the search engine results.
Greater Conversion Rates
Numerous studies on user behavior confirm that smooth performance is crucial to conversion rates. However complex the topic of conversion may be, quick speed and intuitive navigation help a lot in generating leads and sales.
On the other hand, slow speed – especially at checkout – leads to a massive drop in sales. For every 60-second delay, the conversions drop by 7%, while about 79% of online shoppers state that poor performance can make them stay away from a website for good.
Negative Publicity
Social media play a very important role in the world. Today, we can talk to anybody anywhere at any point in time.
Because users talk to one another, just a word about a slow website speed could cause an increment in exit rates of customers and block out potential new consumers. Since we established that no one wants to have to wait long minutes to get what they want, a badly reviewed websites get the brunt of the feedbacks and reactions.
Nearly half of all users who have a bad experience with a site are quick to spread the word around.
Maximizing the Website’s Key Resources
Increasing the page load speed does two things to the website. By definition, tt removes a lot superfluous details and reduces the number of connections made to the hosting server.
Basic speed optimization entails image compression and GZIP. Both fixes reduce the bandwidth needed to transfer a web page across the network, from a web server to the end user’s browser. Server-side caching, content delivery networks, and certain code-trimming techniques can speed things up even more.
It works such that if the attention span of users on the website begins to wane, Google crawler gets a hint that the website does not provide any content with value to customers. In return, it reduces the rank of such website by indexing some pages as unavailable thus reducing the chance of establishing a successful online presence.