Reason Why Website Speed Matters

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A slow page can be a reason for your ROI troubles! Website speed is a crucial factor in providing customer satisfaction, a positive user experience, and better SEO. Studies show that 79% of shoppers won’t return to a website if they’ve encountered trouble with website speed. More studies show that 53% of mobile visitors exit a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

🚀 Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀

It’s important for businesses to address the needs of this generation of buyers and meet their standards. Failing to provide what the consumers need when they need it will negatively impact your revenue.

How Your Slow Page Costs You Sales

1. A Slow Website Results in a Higher Bounce Rate

Bounce rate pertains to the percentage of all the users who viewed just one page on your site and then left without doing anything else. Normally, you would want to aim for a bounce rate of 25% to 40%; 41% to 55% is considered average, and any more than that will need to be improved depending on the purpose of the page.

A slow site creates high bounce rates because consumers are not going to wait around for a page to load. If they can’t get it from one site, they can easily exit and go to another site.

Google said that the probability of a user clicking out of your website increases by 32% as the page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.

2. Slow Traffic 

A slow page will cause traffic loss; fewer site visitors will mean lost opportunities to engage and convert consumers. An average of 79% of website visitors never returns to a website once they experience the slow performance from that site resulting in a loss in traffic.

1. Slow performance = lost oppurtunities

3. Drop-in Search Rankings

A page’s loading speed is one of the newest metrics Google just added in its 2021 Core Web Vitals update (CWV). The CWV is part of Google’s Page Experience Ranking Score which includes factors like web security, safe-browsing, mobile optimization, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

Google updated the CWV with three additional ranking signals, one of which is the Largest Contentful Paint or LCP which tackles everything that has to do with loading speed. The other two are the First Input Delay which tackles how interactive your website. The other, Cumulative Layout Shift measures your website’s stability. For the sake of this article, we’ll focus on the first metric, the largest contentful paint.

The Largest Contentful Paint scores your website’s loading performance. You need to get a score of 2.5 seconds or lower to pass and provide your visitors with a good experience.

LCP measures the moment when the user clicks on the page link, up until the time when they see the content on the screen. 

Some of the elements that fall under the LCP are:

<img> or Image elements

• <image> or Image elements that are inside an <svg> elements
• <video> or Video elements 
• Background images loaded using the URL() function
• Blocks

Not only will users not have the patience to wait for these elements to load, but Google will also drop rankings when it gets a whiff that these elements are not optimized.

4. Lower Conversion Rate

Almost 70% of online consumers said that a website’s speed impacts their decision to buy from an online store. From signing up for a service to filling out a form to buying a product, the desired action will not be taken when a page takes several seconds to load. When more site visitors fail to complete an action, expect your conversion rate to take a dive. 

Low conversion rates mean low sales, and low sales mean low revenues.

5. Increased Abandoned Carts Lead To Lower Revenue

If your website is slow, your customers will abandon their carts before they even complete any transaction. There are currently more than 12 million to 24 million online retailers in the world, and more are popping up every day. Customers have a lot of choices. 

Read also 8 Tips for Generating Return Customers to Your eCommerce Business

If they find that the service or performance is not up to their standards, they can easily abandon their carts and find another shop selling the same kind of product or service you offer.

2. Customers have a lot of choices! Help them to choose you!

6. Lose Business to Competitors

A slow page could drive customers to your competitors. Because they have more options, there is nothing stopping them from abandoning a sluggish site for a speedy one.

Customers have expectations and when those expectations aren’t met, they will look to businesses that will satisfy their needs.

7. Drop in Online Visibility

Ecommerce websites rely on web traffic to thrive and succeed online. Unique visitors are your bread and butter, but you won’t be able to attract new visitors if your website isn’t ranking on search engines. It’s for this reason that search engine optimization is a valuable practice for businesses that operate purely online.

Traffic doesn’t directly impact your revenue, but it is the first step in converting visitors to buyers. Without visitors, you won’t have users to convert. 

Now that Google takes into consideration speed and loading time when ranking a website, it makes it even more of a priority for webmasters to optimize all the elements in the website.

Content still plays a crucial role in Google’s ranking system, but aspects like speed boost your ranking score. For example, when you’re publishing content on topics your competitors are also publishing, Google will add more value to the website that’s quick-loading on top of providing relevant content. 

Read also 20 Best Web Analytics Tools for Your Ecommerce in 2021

8. Bad Customer Experience

Reports show that the average attention span of a person has been reduced to 8 seconds, that’s one second shorter than the attention span of a goldfish. 

Not only do you have to ensure that your product is interesting enough to hold the user’s attention, but you also need to ensure that the platform you’re using to sell the product will live up to your customer’s expectations. Also, this is where great customer service comes at hand! And where there is customer service, omnichannel follows.

9. Loss of Customer Loyalty

It’s difficult to retain customers and keep them loyal when they don’t enjoy the services you provide. 

If a website continues to perform poorly, customers will eventually lose patience and look for another provider or store. It won’t matter if they love your products or services, because it’s more difficult to tolerate poor performance, especially if it involves waiting and wasting time.

Ultimately, this will also impact your sales and the reputation of your brand.

3. Find the sweet spot and help your customer to build their loyalty

10. Poor Online Reputation

A positive online reputation is one of the most powerful assets for any brand! Not only do positive impressions and outstanding feedback contribute to your marketing strategy, but it also helps you rank higher on search engines and attract more customers. 

Poor online reputation does the opposite. Not only will search engines ignore ranking your website but the negative experience and feelings a brand leaves on a consumer will stick. This will cause users to scroll past links or posts associated with the brand.

Any difficulty consumer experiences with your website won’t be forgotten. Chances are, the user will even post a review about that experience with details that other people can read. Surveys have shown that a negative review can convince 94% of consumers to avoid a business. The impact of your brand’s online reputation on sales and revenue collection is huge. 

You want people to form a favorable opinion about your brand, and providing them with a fast website will leave them with a good first impression.

Tips to Optimize Your Website Speed

• Test Your Website Performance- Regular testing can help you track performance issues and pinpoint areas that can be improved. You can use plenty of tools to measure performance. One of which is Google’s own PageSpeed Insights. It will show you an estimate of your page’s load speed and it will give you a list of recommendations on elements to improve on your page. Another tool from Google is the Google Search Console (GSC). The difference between PageSpeed Insights and GSC is that GSC shows you data for your entire website. 
• Remove any third-party elements or scripts that are not useful anymore since they will only slow down page speed. Review all of your installed plugins or themes and retain only the ones you need or those that don’t overload your server.
• Use a better content delivery network (CDN). A CDN decreases load time by caching content in different locations. This allows the servers to be near the user rather than the host. So when a user issues a request, the request will go to the CDN instead of getting the data from the hosting server.
• Lazy load content so that images will only load when users are ready to view them. Allowing images to load as the user scrolls to the area will allow bandwidth to be properly allocated.
• Remove or convert any large elements. Check that all your images are loading perfectly on all devices and that they load quickly. If it takes an image some time to load, compress it into a smaller file size. Use online tools like tinypng to convert an image if tools like Photoshop or illustrator aren’t available. 

Wrap Up

Improve Your Website Speed = Improve Your Revenue

Website speed matters for any business. You could have the most beautiful web design, but if it takes several seconds before pages load, your search rankings and revenues will tank.

Prioritize speed and usability. A quick website is effective in helping improve your online visibility, traffic, engagement, and ultimately, your revenue.

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Dan Smink is the founder of C1 Partners, a Denver SEO company that helps small to medium enterprises with their digital marketing strategy. Dan comes from a background of 20 years in business leadership and has a track record of helping businesses achieve million-dollar revenue values. He is an active community leader and a contributor to the Forbes.com’s Agency Council spreading the word on how digital strategies can make a positive impact on today’s businesses. You may connect with him on LinkedIn.