Everything happens so fast in the modern world. Speed is valued highly and often preferred to other features. So when we visit the site with a low load time, we feel the urge of leaving it at once. If you have a site with the same problem, remember your emotions when you waited for the page to load. Were you frustrated? Irritated? Angry? Now you know what your clients feel browsing through your site.
The site should be convenient and efficient. There is a range of factors to consider to attain the goal. The load speed is one of the most crucial factors. If you neglect this thing, the users won’t get a chance to evaluate other aspects, which contribute to the success, such as design, functionality, interface etc. There are other reasons as well that explain why site load speed matters much.
1. High load speed decreases the number of bounce rates
Image Source: SponsoredlinxIt is important to understand the customers and explore their behavior on the site. What do they do when they get to your site? Do they want to browse through it or they hurriedly abandon the site to make the order at the rival company?
There are a lot of tools tracking users’ actions, the results of which are rather eloquent and can tell us much. The owners of online stores should conduct research and study these figures to understand their customers better just the way the professional marketers do. They consider the results to see if customers are interested in the service/product. What do they pay attention to?
A high level of bounce rates on the site is a result of a low quality entry page. Website holders should try their best to decrease the level of bounce rates. The efforts to enhance the bounce rates pay back well. The customer base increases and people are more inclined to buy the services or commodities on your site.
As it was mentioned already, the load speed is just one of the elements that determine success. Neither the design, nor the unique offer is helpful if the site is slow. You provide the service and the way the site functions determines its quality. Customers can tolerate certain flaws on the site but this does not refer to slow load speed. Most visitors just leave the site and never return. Those who stay are less inclined to buy from you. If one service is of poor quality, how can you guarantee high-quality performance in other aspects? A slow-loading website does not attract potential clients even if it has exclusive content on its pages. What’s the use of high-class pictures or stunning texts if the visitors are devoid of the opportunity to enjoy all this? It outweighs all other faults.
It is very curious to observe how the stats change along with the load time. One second delay seems to be tiny but it causes 11% drop in page views. Can you imagine the scale of losses for a huge online marketplace? It will definitely exceed the costs for improvement of load speed. You can also employ the services that regularly test uptime percent and response time for your site in different parts of the world such as HRANK.com. It will let you expand your customer base globally.
Can you imagine that each forth visitor does not wait for the site to load and just goes away in case the load time exceeds 4 seconds? Test the load speed and take measures without delay if you see that your store does not meet these requirements. Otherwise, you can lose 25% of visitors.
Also, you should not put up with the normal bounce rate in case it takes too long for your site to load. It is very annoying for users to browse through the website with slowly loading pages. Who is the main target audience of the online stores? As a rule, busy people choose to shop online as they want to save time. Just imagine how impatient they are when the site does not work properly. According to Hubsport report, 70% of customers do not finish the purchase and leave the carts with commodities. The experts have calculated that 46% of them (almost half!) never come back to the resource again. From that moment it is associated with a low quality service for them. The figures say that the annual revenue losses reach 3 billion dollars for this reason.
It is rather reckless to neglect the facts and huge figures mentioned above.
2. High load speed improves Google ranking
Image Source: SearchenginelandThough it is not a secret and Google even announced it, few people are aware of this fact. Speed up the site load if you want to improve its ranking in search engines. It is not a determining ranking factor in comparison with relevancy of content, for instance. However, Google takes this parameter into consideration. It means that fast loading sites are higher on search result pages. Why refuse from this excellent competitive edge if you benefit from it in all aspects? Also, the slow sites are indexed slower thus decreasing the traffic volume.
3. Slow loading sites kill conversion
People do not want to buy anything from slow loading sites, consequently, it directly affects the revenues.
Slow-loading online stores do not have a stable customer base. It is hard to succeed without regular clients, whole the new ones do not come to the site due to low Google ranking. The potential clients just do not see the store in the search engines.
Here are some figures to remember. Even a second of load lag time reduces conversion by 7%. 1 second of delay decreases customer satisfaction – it becomes 16% lower!
Fast loading sites tend to earn more. You can emulate the best and borrow the practices of most successful e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, which raised conversion with faster load speed. The marketing team of the company has come up with the following results: when the load time became 1 second faster, it brought to 2% conversion rise.
Mozilla managed to increase the number of Firefox downloads by 60 million after the page load speed became 2.2 seconds faster.
Shopzilla achieved 25% rise of page views that brought in its turn to higher revenues (7-12%). These actions also allowed the team to economize on hardware. As a result, the company required only one half of it to operate the site on the same level.
It is easy to make the conclusion. Speed up your site to attain higher conversion rate and earn more money!
Image Source: Pluto7What is needed for a high load speed? The mission is impossible without a good web host. No matter how hard you try, all your efforts are useless without a high-quality web host service. If you need unbiased reviews of web host services, HRANK.com can be helpful.
Many users do not notice any flaws until the site grows bigger. The functionality becomes richer and the developer tries to implement it on the site, but it becomes impossible for some technical reason. Frequently, the web host is to blame for it. You can always find the host, which enables use of more powerful functionality.
What are the industry standards for website load time?
It is recommended to have a perfect load speed for good performance. The load time within 1 second meets the industry standards nowadays. If it is not possible, then 2 or 3 seconds maximum will keep the work of your site at its best. However, most sites do not cope with this. The average load speed parameters vary from 3 to 7 seconds but reduce the level of conversion and profit accordingly. If you tested the speed load and discovered that it is low (figure is over 10), the problem is top urgent. The specialists advise to invite the professional and determine the cause of the problem to find the solution and enhance the site speed.
