5 Reasons Why Your Website Needs to Load Faster
Consider this:
Would you go back to that sandwich joint if they take more time than usual to give you a bite?
What do you do with employees or service providers when they continuously delay their deadlines?
What do you feel about delayed flights, trains, and buses?
What kind of a review would you leave for an ecommerce store that promised a shipment today but delivers it a week late?
The answer: you know better than to do business with these guys again.
Most of these businesses have a geographic happenstance and some sort of pardon can be possible since you are there, in person. It doesn’t happen that way for websites today. If your website has fonts that are too hard (or too small) to read, your website takes ages to load, and if it crashes every time visitors take some sort of action (from clicking on buttons to submitting forms), your customers aren’t going to come back.
They have nothing to lose. You, however, do. Page speed isn’t important just for this though. There are at least five more reasons. Dig them here: Easy to access, use, and consume. Easy to sell It’s just common sense: you’d feel like accessing, using, and spending more time on websites that are easy to use. You’d spend more time on a website, interact more with the content on the website, and much more.
Speeding up your website gives your users an incredible experience. They’d remember these experiences. They’d spread the word about it, and they’d not just get enough of you. If you had anything to sell out there on your website, it’s only a matter of time when random, casual visitors to your website become paying customers. Search ranking has a lot to do with page load speed. A few things with respect to your website should be obvious such as relevant, content quality, great design, topics you publish about, reputation, inbound links, and more.
Matt McGee of Search Engine Land refers to an official statement from Google. It was confirmed at last four years ago that site speed has a lot to do with your search ranking. The focus is on quality of the pages, the content, the layout, the design overall, and the page speed. If you are under the illusion that all of these factors are attributed to the “big boys”, Matt Cutts helps resolve your myth – smaller sites can respond faster to changes, implement necessary infrastructure, make changes to enhance site speed, and more.
Small or big, then, site speed affects SEO. Are you on to it? Faster load times enhance your branding. A brand is a promise, right? You promise that the shirt your customers buy will be of the best quality ever. Or maybe you promise that the car you sell is reliable, safe, fast, or easy to maintain. Perhaps you promise shipments in a single day.
Over time, when you meet these promises relentlessly without ever skipping a single instance of breaking them, you create your brand. Guess what happens when the page doesn’t load, slows slowly, crashes somewhere along the way, or goes unresponsive? The brand is tarnished. Your customers think “this website sucks. I could visit the moon and get back and this won’t load”. If that’s the first impression – or even a dreadful recurring impression – does your brand stand a chance? Snappy websites are the key. Not even glamorous ones, according to Jacob Nielsen of Nielsen Group. He also points out that in a survey, users reported that the speed of a site is one of the factors users take into account to determine brand value. Page speed affects profitability. According to Baymard Group, the average abandonment rate of ecommerce websites stands at 62%. That’s not surprising given than one of the top reasons why visitors leave websites is “poor user experience”, according to Ian Mills– co-founder and CEO of MagicDust.
Chris Lake of Econsultancy.com points out slow speed times as one of the reasons making website visitors leave along with other reasons such as woeful navigation, ads dominating pages, interstitial ads, pop-ups, auto-playing media, and more. All these elements are causing you a profitability burn. There’s a reason why “keep it simple, stupid” is a well-accepted best practice. Speed up web pages. Because you can. It doesn’t take much today to make your websites load faster.
Using any of the DIY tools out there such as Wix, SquareSpace, and others, you can develop a responsive website in no time. Likewise, there are responsive themes available for practically all CMS systems, ecommerce engines, and more. You’d obviously want to start with testing how fast your website really is. Start with free tools such as Google’s PageSpeed and Page Speed Insights, GTMetrix, Web Page Test, PingDom Tools, LoadImpact, and many more. If you are like 62% of other users who use WordPress, you have robust hosting solutions built for website speed such as Web Synthesis. If you use Drupal like another 9% of all websites are running on, you have access to Drupal focused hosting from HudHosting.
In addition to actual hosting, you can use plenty of tools such as Amazon Cloud Front, Cloud Flare, MaxCDN, and other third-party services to speed up your website. Responsive design is a mandate. Fast websites have business-centric reasons. Users have plummeting levels of patience and tolerance. There are an increasing number of devices using which your customers will tend to get to you. Plus, it all looks bad for your branding when your site doesn’t load quick enough. If anything, page speed is now sitting right there between your profitability and your customers. How fast is your website? What are you doing to make it load faster? What kind of hosting are you using? Share your experiences with us. Tell us what stops from keeping your website nimble and quick.
Author Bio: Jeff Davis is living in California and currently associated with Quick Laptop Cash – A place for selling a laptop online. He has been in this field for the last 6 years and is responsible for troubleshooting issues. Interact to discuss projects, technology solutions.
