Did you know?
1 in 4 visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load
46% of users don’t revisit poorly performing websites
64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will shop elsewhere next time
1 second delays reduce customer satisfaction by 16%
In short, your website's speed is super important to the growth of your business and the conversion rate of turning visitors into paying customers. Keep reading to find out more!
Wait, what exactly is website speed?
“Website speed” refers to the speed at which each webpage is downloaded from its hosting server and displayed in a user’s web browser. “Page load time”, meanwhile, is the time it takes to display all of a webpage’s content in a user’s browser after they’ve clicked onto the site.
Ideally, you’ll want your website to load within three seconds, or two seconds if it's an ecommerce site. The two-to-three second mark is the turning point where bounce rates skyrocket – in fact, 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site. Here are 3 reasons why website load time is so important:
The time it takes for your website to load can impact everything from sales to search engine performance, meaning ecommerce sites will literally pay the price for delays. If you’re running an ecommerce site that makes $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could cost you $2.5 million per year in lost sales.
Loading times also impact how your business will fare against the competition. Studies show that 79% of online shoppers who have a dissatisfying experience are less likely to buy from the same site again, while 64% would simply purchase from a different online store. Yikes!
Because to Google, the user comes first – and as we’ve seen, slow load times mean dissatisfied users. Google’s research showed that the chance of a bounce increased by 32% when a page load time went from one to three seconds, and by 90% when the page load time went from one to five seconds. If a site takes up to 10 seconds to load, then the chance of a bounce increases to 123%.
Okay, I want to improve my website's speed. What can I do?
There are things you can do to improve your site's speed right away.
There are great online tools you can use to check your website's performance and give you a detailed report. We use GTmetrix for Simplypress. Scroll down to see our latest report!
Check that your images are no larger than they need to be for your website and that they are in the right file format (PNGs are generally better for graphics while JPEGs are recommended for photographs). Also ensure that they are compressed for the web.
The amount of traffic you receive, the resources each page consumes, the software your server employs, and the hosting provider you use all effect your server response time. Look for and fix performance bottlenecks like sluggish database queries, delayed routing, or a lack of adequate memory to enhance your server response time.
Each time a page redirects to another page, your visitor faces additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. For example, if your mobile redirect pattern looks like this:
example.com -> www.example.com -> m.example.com -> m.example.com/home
...each of those two additional redirects makes your page load slower. Reducing them can assist in cutting down on loading times.
We hope this guide was helpful and gave you some insight! We've included a capture of Simplypress's latest performance report. Interested in improving your current website's speed and overall performance? We can help you! Contact us today.
