Why Speeding up Your Website is So Important

Your design is perfect, your content is engaging, and your product is perfectly suited to meet the needs of your customers. The speed of your website can’t matter that much, right? Wrong.

Studies have shown that as little as one second of delay in the load time of your pages can yield:

• A 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• An 11% drop in page views
• A 7% loss in conversions

Amazon confirmed this information, by showing that their revenue increased by 1%, for every 100 milliseconds their site speed was improved by. Walmart also showed a 2% increase in conversion rate for every one second of improvement.

Instant Gratification

The world that we currently live in is focused largely on the concept of instant gratification. However, as functions and applications for websites grow larger, and companies begin using heavier concepts for their site design, website load speed is increasing. Though 47% of all online browsers expect a web page to load in less than two seconds, the average loading time is actually 7.72 seconds. In spite of this, 40% of online shoppers will abandon any page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Obviously, improving the speed of your website is essential to staying ahead of the competition. Not only does it contribute to keeping your Google ranking high, it also ensures that you have more potential to generate profits. According to statistics, an e-commerce website that generates approximately $100,000 a day could lose $2.5 million in sales every year as a result of a single-second delay in loading times.

Is Your Site too slow?

There’s a plethora of engaging information available on the web today to show how essential site performance is to the bottom-line results of a company. However, once you’ve recognized that speed is important, you may wonder how you go about checking the status of your own website. Luckily, there are a number of web-based tools and services available for website owners to access.

Page Speed Insights by Google provides it’s very own medium for website and company owners to check out website performance. Simply type in an address and hit the “analyze” button, and Google will assign a score between 0 and 100. Importantly, though the score will represent how well optimized the website is to achieve a certain speed, it does not measure the actual load time. Content from other websites, slow servers, and other outside elements can still kill the rate of a website with a great score.