Everyone has surely experienced a slow website before. Yes, it is an inconvenience, but how big of a deal is it?
Spoiler: a very big deal.
With the majority of website traffic now taking place via mobile devices, and that trend continuing to grow, website performance is more important than ever as small performance issues that go unnoticed on high-speed internet connections are amplified when a user is on a spotty mobile data connection.
In this post, we will talk about three concrete reasons why the speed of your website matters beyond just being an inconvenience to your users. We'll also be referencing some statistics from a study done by Google, Fifty-Five, and Deloitte where they analyzed the sites of 37 leading brands in both the U.S. and Europe.
Let's get into it.
1. Slow Speeds Can Crush Your Conversion Rates
Conversion rate is a crucial metric every business should know and actively monitor.
Essentially, your conversion rate is just the percentage of your website users that perform your desired action, such as buy a product, submit a lead generation form, etc. Conversion rate has a direct impact on revenue and sales.
"Decreasing mobile site load time by one-tenth of a second resulted in an 8.4% increase in conversion rates for retail sites" (source)
"Decreasing load time by 0.1s led to the bounce rate of lead generation pages improving by 8.3%." (source)
"When load time was decreased by 0.1s, retail customer engagement increased by 5.2%" (source)
For context, a blink of an eye is anywhere between 0.1s to 0.2s on average.
2. High Mobile Performance Helps Organic Traffic
Google uses many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factors to determine how to rank a certain website on a search result page relative to other sites. They have been using page speed performance as a ranking factor since 2010, and in recent years, they have only been increasing the importance of speed within SEO.
To put it another way, a slow website can hurt your Google rankings. Lower Google search ranking means less traffic to your website and ultimately fewer conversions.
3. Good User Experience Leads To Customer Loyalty
"Around 70% of people say that the speed of a page affects their willingness to buy from an online retailer." (source)
Users remember when they had a smooth experience on a site that satisfied their needs. Even more so, users remember when they had a frustrating user experience. Nothing is worse than sitting around waiting for each page to load slowly in between each step. A slow website is also one of many factors that can hurt your entire business' credibility.
Give your users what they are looking for in a modern user experience and enjoy the benefits of customer loyalty.
In conclusion, hopefully you can see why having not just a fast-enough site but a fast-as-possible site is crucial to success.
Need a hand?
At 2 Rivers Digital, we build blazing fast sites using the latest and greatest tools, languages, and frameworks to adhere to all of today's best practices.
At the time of publishing this post, via pingdom.com's speed test tool, 2riversdigital.com has a load time of 248ms - which is 10 to 20 times faster than other local web development agencies' sites in our area!
If you are shopping around for a web development service provider, make sure you verify that they can walk the walk when it comes to site performance and check their scores with tools like the one mentioned above.
If you're ready to learn more about building a modern, performant site, contact us today!