5 Reasons to Have a Fast Loading Website Speed for Your Company
A fast loading website can improve a company in areas before unknown.
Website loading times are an important factor in the effectiveness of a business’ website. Every company should use website speed optimization tricks for faster load times. Most sites today load within two seconds. A load time much longer than that is noticeable to customers. As the IT head for a tech business, you may wonder if slow loading pages can hurt your business. Rest assured, it can. Slow loading speed can not only hurt the bottom line, it can threaten your company’s business and IT equipment. The following are reasons to have a fast loading website speed for your company’s site.
Starting your website out on the right foot can make all of the difference.
Customer Psychology
Your site’s slow loading speed is not only irritating, it’s detrimental to your customer’s psyche. Humans are usually calmer and more satisfied if they feel in control of a situation. Slow loading times get in the way of this. Whether the customer is in a hurry or not, they will swiftly be put on edge by a slow waiting time. Slow loading is perceived by the brain as a loss of control. It’s no wonder that most of us do not enjoy waiting for an undetermined amount of time. Moreover, humans have a roughly 8-second-long attention span. To maximize their attention, your pages should load as quickly as possible.
SEO Implications
Google and other search engines take website load time into consideration when ranking search results. These search engines have their own reputation to maintain in terms of loading times. If they give customers a lot of results that take forever to load, they’ll be blamed for it. Therefore, the search engines make sure your site won’t hurt them too. Likewise, a fast loading site is more likely to deliver a positive user experience. This aligns with the purpose of search engines to return quality results for visitors. Taking this into consideration, checking load speed can be important part of an SEO strategy.
Conversion Rate
Speeding up load time will directly affect your conversion rate. A conversion rate is the percentage of people visiting your site that do what you want a customer to do. This can range from buying something to signing up for a newsletter. Depending on the business model, each conversion could be very valuable over the life of a customer. What is known is that by increasing your load speed by 100 milliseconds, you can add about 7% to your conversion rate. For internet retailers, your speed index matters a lot. Many e-retailers have seen massive increases in conversions by boosting website speed. This is hard proof a faster load time will result in more business for you.
Bounce Rate
In contrast, the slower your load speed is, the higher your bounce rate will be. The bounce rate is the percentage of website viewers who leave your website upon the first pageview. At a 3 second load time, your bounce rate should be about 32% more than a 1 second load time. At five seconds, that rate increases to nearly 90%. To keep visitors from leaving, optimize your WordPress site speed with quality hosting, caching and compression. Your bounce rate needs to be tightly controlled to keep the company website running properly. Speeding up loading can be key to solving it and keeping visitors on your website longer.
Website Problems
A slow load speed can also be a sign that there are tech problems with the site. It can be an early warning sign that your servers are not in good condition. It can also be caused be your code being too dense and the site clogged up with slow to load media. A well-designed website should load quickly and efficiently. If yours is not loading properly, then you should look to see why it’s so slow. A slowdown caused by such problems can cause other errors that would cost the company more money. If you look into a slow loading website, you will probably find many website problems that could become profitable fixes for the company.
A slow running website can cause a lot of problems for your tech company. It can cause your customers to lose patience for your company. Further, slow speeds can hurt your rankings on search engines. It can negatively affect your conversion rate. On top of that, speed can increase your bounce rate. It might even be a sign of other tech problems on the site. For these reasons, it’s important to make sure your company’s website runs quickly and efficiently.
