How A Faster Page Load Time Benefits Your Website

Speed matters. It's why pizza shops guarantee delivery in 30-minutes or less, Olympic sprinters become international superstars and websites that load the fastest get the most traffic. Nobody wants to wait these days - especially online. Slow-loading websites negatively impact everything from the customer experience to conversion rates to sales. Here's why

People Have No Patience

According to Statistics Brain, the average attention span of a human is right around 8 seconds. That's shorter than that of a goldfish and an awful long time to wait for a website to load. If your website takes too long to load, people are going to click away faster than you can say "yeah, but ... ." it doesn't matter if it's your homepage or a landing page, the website people come to first has to load in a hurry. Because if the first page doesn't come together quickly, people aren't going to wait around to find out if secondary pages are any quicker. They're simply going to go find a competitor. In fact, even a delay of one singular second can cause a 7 percent decrease in conversions. That's right: 1 second. This means that if your website is ringing up $100,000 a day in sales, a 1-second delay can cost you $7,000 a day (or more than $2.5 million a year) Ouch.

People Have a Need for Speed

So how fast should your website load in order to keep prospective customers from clicking away? Well, a recent survey showed that nearly half of online customers (47 percent) expect websites to load within two seconds of them arriving. Smartphone users are a little more forgiving, with 64 percent saying a 4-second load time is acceptable. And while these expectations might be unreasonable--especially when you consider that not all WiFi connections are created equal--they are a fact of online life.

You're In Control

Customers don't really care who is to blame for slow load times on websites. They just know that you are in control of your website--and one survey found that nearly 80 percent of all online shoppers will avoid slow-loading websites and they will punish you.

• Nearly 80 percent of customers who find themselves less than satisfied with your website probably won't attempt to make a purchase from you again.
• A simple 1-second delay in your page load time means you'll lose 11 percent of your page views
• That same simple 1-second delay can cost you 7 percent of your conversions

That's the bad news. The good news is that you are in control. You can build your website in a way that increases the likelihood of it loading quickly. You can use one (or more) of the website speed test tools available to make sure your website is loading quickly at home and around the world. You can find a host (and a hosting plan) that provides you with the best hardware and bandwidth available. And you can ensure that the images you're using on your site (as well as all the other elements) are optimized for the web.

Don't Let a Slow-Loading Website Drag You Down Speed Matters

If your conversion rates aren't what they should be--or if you'd like them to be better--take the time to ensure that your website loads so fast people don't have the opportunity to click away. If you want help, connect with the experts at GMR Web Team.