How Slow Websites Can Hurt Your Business

How Slow Websites Can Hurt Your Business

Every second it takes your website to load increases the chance visitors will abandon your site. Not only is there a direct relationship between slow loading and visitor abandonment, there is a correlation between short load times and sales. Ensuring your servers load quickly can help increase your conversion rate, decrease visitor abandonment, and improve search engine statistics.

Visitor Abandonment and Customer Conversion Rates

Different studies claim different abandonment rates, but generally speaking, around a quarter of visitors will leave after four seconds. By the time you hit ten seconds, 40% or more will have abandoned a slow-loading site. Any traffic decreases will reduce potential customers while simultaneously increasing bounce rate and visitors’ impatience.

Studies have show that even a one-second delay can reduce page views by 11%, customer satisfaction by 16%, and sales by 7%. This study is several years old, so, if anything, customers will be expecting faster load times as internet speed increases.

Server Load Times and SEO

As of April 2010, Google began taking server load times into account when calculating search rankings. Over the years they have continually reafirmed that website speed matters. By monitoring website loading time from Google Chrome and Google Toolbar, the search engine realized that when Google ranked slow websites well, people began using Google less.

While less than 1% of searches are affected by load time, Google recommends keeping a website faster than 95% of other servers. Google has been intentionally vague around the specific rank penalties on slow sites, but there are a number of companies that have independently studied load time and managed to improve their search rankings by tweaking their server speed.

With such a high priority on website performance, it is important to have a quick web host for both Google and your end user expectations. See the statistics on web host speed at this website. Make sure you continually benchmark speed, and develop for website performance and not just astetics.

Website Speed Testing

A correlation between ranking and time-to-first-byte has been identified as the primary factor that affects search ranking. Testing server speed is the first step to improving load time. The first go-to speed-testing tool is the Google Page Speed Insights in Webmaster Tools. The tool will analyze a given domain and offer both mobile and desktop speed analyses with recommendations on how to remedy problems.

Testing server speed is the first step to improving load time. There are a number of sites online where you can run a web site speed test. However, a thorough internal examination is the best way to improve server speed and ensure your site keeps pace with your customers and Google.

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