Is your website hurting your business?
With an increasing number of people turning to their mobile devices for shopping, most sites don't even come close to the user experience expected by consumers- leading to lost sales and disappointed customers.
People are sick of clunky and confusing mobile sites. They expect to be able to explore your website quickly and seamlessly with instant gratification, which they've grown accustomed to from the ubiquitous smartphone.
How a slow website hurts your business
There are many factors that can contribute to a page loading slowly, such as slow server response, large images, and scripts that take a long time to run. There are a few key ways to tell if your website is slow. One is to use a speed test tool such as Google's PageSpeed Insights. This will give you a report on how well your website is performing and where you could make improvements.
1. Google hates you
No need to be subtle about it, page speed is a direct factor in SEO – meaning that a slow page speed is most likely impacting your ability to rank for your target keywords.
Page speed (especially on mobile phones) is a highly important ranking factor, not only for Google's organic search engine results but also for your Google Business Profile listing to appear high in search results.
2. The pain of bounce rates
A bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site after viewing one page or less, or after visiting for less than 30 seconds.. Bounce rates increase when the number of pages viewed decreases and when the site becomes slower. Google considers high bounce rates as a sign of low quality or ill-fit topics. To boot, slow websites can cause users to abandon a site, leading to lost revenue.
3. Lower conversion rates = lost revenues
According to recent studies, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. If a website's pages are too slow, shoppers will abandon their shopping carts in 20% of cases and revenue is lost. Not only that, if you’re looking to build customer loyalty, people will often abandon sites if they don't load quickly enough, which is damaging to customer loyalty.
Why is improving the speed of your website important for your business?
In 2020, a study by Deloitte Digital titled Milliseconds make Millions provided a much clearer view of the positive effect mobile page speed can have on performance metrics that matter to marketers, including conversion rates, average order values, and even page views.
In a nutshell, the study observed the following key improvements to engagement and conversion funnel progress based on a 0.1s site speed improvement:
- An 8.4% increase in conversions with retail consumers was observed, and an increase in average order value of 9.2%.
- When mobile site speed improved we also observed a positive change in number of page views, conversion rates, and average order value.
- Retail consumers were most sensitive to speed in the pre-checkout stages of their conversion journey
- Bounce rates on product listing pages in retail and travel improved by 5.7% and 5.4% respectively
- Retail customer engagement increased by 5.2%.
The Internet is a place where instant gratification reigns supreme. Web pages are expected to load quickly and efficiently, or they will be abandoned in favor of the next page that can deliver what's needed quickly.
In a Salesforce Research study titled State of the connected customer, 2nd edition, they found that 61% of customers have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience.
How fast should your website be?
Google aims for under half-a-second load time. To be honest, that is next to impossible to achieve. This said, in a recent study, the average load time for a mobile web page is 22 seconds.
Ideally, 3-4 seconds to get what is called the First Contentful Paint is what you should be aiming for.
In other studies, people would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load and formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.
How can you improve your site speed?
The most important thing is to start by understanding your mobile page speed by using tools like Test My Site.
There are many technical aspects to look at in a website, such as optimizing your images, minimizing white space, line returns and comment tags. Also, removing unnecessary META tags and META content as well as minimizing unnecessary javascript and any other client-side scripting.
But that's just the beginning. You'll also need to make sure your website is easy to navigate, simple enough for visitors to use and ultimately converts them into a customer.
If you're looking for a way to build up your business, you need to look no further than investing in your website's speed. Investing in fast page loading speeds could lead to increased revenue, increased brand awareness, increased trustworthiness and even increased advocacy from satisfied customers.
The experts at LocalClix have 20 + years of experience building fast-converting websites. They can provide you with a complete site audit and recommendations that will help take your business to the next level.
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LocalClix can help you future proof your local business by improving the positioning and visibility of your business in local search with our local marketing solutions.
Contact us today for a consultation on how to generate more calls, walks in and sales for your business!
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