Last Updated on January 10, 2018 by
How is your slow website losing business? Everyone hates a slow website. We’ve all clicked on a website link and saw a progress bar that never seems to move! Maybe, you click reload to see if that fixes it. More than likely, you click back and find another link to click, or you just give up altogether.
As consumers, as people, we all know we find this annoying. But, what does that mean for you the business owner?
Simply put, your slow website is losing business! Even if you’re doing well, you’re loosing more potential business if you have a slow site. Let’s look at how your slow website is hurting your business.
#1 – User Experience
The first reason that will cause a website to lose new business is just how people respond to slow things. We live in a fast-paced world where everyone wants things fast, especially Americans.
Just think of how you responded the last time you had to wait an extra few minutes for your food at a restaurant. How about the long drive through line at your local Starbucks? Or how about waiting on hold with your cable/internet provider? That last one almost gives me nightmares.
There are many studies that have been done to back up how astonishingly short our patience is, and it’s only getting worse. As shocking as this might be, it’s important to understand the effects of human behavior and how it affects your business.
One study showed that approximately 1 in 4 website visitors would abandon a website if a page took longer than 4 seconds to load! Think about that for a second. That’s 25% of people can’t wait 4 seconds for a website to load. Seem pretty thin?
Or how about that Amazon found that for every 100ms of latency, it cost them 1% in sales. Yes, in an internal study a couple years back, they found that a mere 1/10th of a second would cost this tech giant 1% in sales.
Other studies have shown that anything beyond a 2-second website page load will negatively affect your user experience and sales.
Basically, slow websites annoy people and lose trust in your website visitors. In turn, this means fewer repeat customers and more abandoned carts and less online leads! So, quite literally, your slow website is losing business and they are going to your competitors!
#2 – SEO Rankings
The second reasons having a slow website is bad, is actually more in line that people think. One of our core services we offer here at MVMG is SEO. Through dealing with many clients over the years, we’ve come to realize that most people don’t quite understand exactly what Google’s job really is. That may sound silly… they’re a search engine, right? Yes, but what does that mean exactly.
It means this: Google’s job (or any other search engine) is to provide users with the best information as quickly as possible.
What does that mean exactly? Well, that means that in order to deliver to their users, they must always be delivering the best search results to a user. If they find that your page is not the absolute best, then they simply don’t put you in the number 1 spot!
Now, this isn’t a article on Search Engine Optimization, but it relates because Google knows that website speed effects users response to pages that are slow. In other words, they know that if a website is slow, users don’t like it and if a user doesn’t like a page then it’s not the best.
So, in addition to a lot of other factors like content, code, links, and tons more, website speed has become a major factor in SERPs or search engine ranking positions.
So, if it wasn’t bad enough that a slow website will piss off your potential website visitors, add to that the fact that Google will demote your rank if your website is slow. That means that not only will you lose visitors that do happen to find you, but you’ll be found significantly less the slower your website is!
Slow Website is Losing Business Recap
Creating a great website is a process and it takes work, but please remember to consider website speed in that process or you will lose potential business.
Have questions? Let me know in the comments below.
