Last Updated on January 12, 2020 by Sunny Staff
Trying to grow a business is hard.
You run social media accounts, you pour your heart and soul into customer service, obsess over customer satisfaction surveys, run sales, do market research, and still things can be a gamble. But what if we told you there’s a way you could grow your customer base by as much as 53 percent without lifting a finger?
Making sure your website is running at top speed can bring you huge returns with very little effort on your part. If you can drop your website load speed by just a few seconds, you could see your revenue start growing exponentially.
The key is knowing what’s making your website slow to load and streamlining the process for your potential customers. Read on to learn why a fast website is so important and how you can make that happen.
It’s Your First Impression
Your website is the digital age equivalent of your handshake. In many cases, it’s the first thing your customers know about you, and it can inform a lot of their opinions of you. That’s part of the reason a good web design is important – it tells your customers you are someone they want to work with.
But you can have the most beautiful website in the world and it won’t make a difference if it takes forever to load. Think about how frustrated you get when you can’t get a web page to load. Do you want your customers’ first impressions of you to be that working with you is a pain in the rear?
People Are Impatient
You might be surprised how little time you have to get your website page loaded before people start getting irritated. Many websites these days take about fifteen seconds to load – seven seconds faster than last year. But the bad news is more than half of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
In truth, your first impression with your customers rests on the first two seconds of interaction they have with your website. If it loads up immediately, they’ll see you as being prompt to respond and convenient to work with. But if you cross over that three-second mark, you’re going to lose more than half of your customer base.
It Can Cost You Conversions
So let’s do some quick math here and figure out how much you’ll lose on that 53 percent. Let’s say your website takes five seconds to load – still three times as fast as the average loading time – and you have 1,000 people who see your site each month. That means you’ll lose 530 potential customers every single month.
Let’s say just ten percent of those potential customers actually wind up buying something from you and that each customer spends $25 with you. Those 53 extra customers will earn you an additional $1,325 every month. Over the course of a year, you’re looking at losing nearly $16,000 because your website takes just two extra seconds to load.
It Will Damage Your Reputation
Unfortunately, when you lose those 53 percent of people, you’re not only losing their money. As you know, the most powerful marketing tool is word of mouth. If a customer has a positive experience with you, they’re much more likely to recommend your business to their friends and family.
But if a customer sees your website as frustrating to use, they won’t tell anyone about you. In fact, they may warn people away, saying your website was clunky and impossible to navigate. You could be missing out on huge exponential growth in the long term; those two seconds could make or break your business.
Your SEO Will Drop
While word of mouth is powerful, it isn’t everything; search engine optimization helps bring in new customers, too. Search engine optimization uses certain qualities on your website to place it further up or down on search results. And since only 6 percent of search engine users click to the second page of search results, you want to be in the top few listings.
But you can use all the keywords you want, and if your website is slow, it won’t matter. Google looks at page load speed when they’re determining search engine rankings. The slower your page is, the more your SEO will suffer.
Things That Might Affect Your Load Speed
So what is it that makes a website load more slowly than you want it to? The simplest answer is extra baggage; the more bells and whistles your website has to pull up when it loads, the longer it’s going to take. Some obvious culprits can include large images, carousels or sliders, videos, or fancy animations.
But even if you take your website down to the bare bones, it may still be running slow if you’re using a website template. These drag-and-drop options are convenient and free, but they can come with a lot of back-end baggage that slows down your site. And if the $5,000 to $10,000 you’re looking at spending on a custom web design sounds like a lot, let’s think back to that $16,000 a year you’re losing in conversions.
How to Speed Up Your Website
So what are some steps you can take to make sure your website hits that two-second load speed? Start by taking out any unnecessary plugins you have running on your page. A simple, clean web design can be easier to navigate, faster to load, and just as beautiful.
Make sure you optimize your images for web use. This will drop their resolution enough so they don’t take forever to load. They’ll still appear clear on your screen, but websites don’t need 300 dots per inch of resolution to look good, and it’ll just drag you down.
Discover What Makes Your Website Slow to Load
Keeping your website moving quickly can literally make or break your business. Figuring out what’s making your website slow to load can increase your revenue by thousands of dollars every year. It can also help your business see greater growth over the long term, and all without you having to lift a finger.
If you’d like to get your website running faster, check out the rest of our site at Sunny HQ. We help WordPress websites shine with managed WordPress hosting, site management, maintenance, and web design. Contact us today to discover the power and ease of having a great website.
