Are you annoyed by websites that take forever to load? You are not alone. No one appreciates slow websites. If your website is slow, be aware that this can affect your traffic and your conversions and make it harder for your business to succeed.
How Fast Is Your Site Speed?
Fast and slow are somewhat relative terms – ask anyone who ever used a dial-up modem to access the internet. We’ve come a long way in a few decades, though, and according to Google, three seconds is an acceptable page speed. Unfortunately, site speed is frequently five times slower than that. If you would like to measure your website’s speed, here are two tools to use:
How did your business website perform? If your site is slow, this will have a negative impact on its success. According to research, even a one-second delay in page loading means a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, a 7% loss in conversions, and 11% fewer page views. Many customers, if they have a bad user experience will not return to your website at all.
It may seem like a few seconds is nothing to worry about, but people have little patience with websites they have to wait for. About half of consumers polled state that they expect a website to load in two seconds or less and 40% will click out if it takes longer than three seconds.
Google also penalizes websites that do not load quickly, both on mobile and desktop. Google factors in load times of websites into their algorithm and gives slower sites lower search rankings, also affecting how many users find those sites in the first place. This is because it believes that it’s in Google’s and their users’ best interest to direct traffic to websites that meet their needs best. Sites that are slow to load do not meet basic criteria and get put into a SEO death spiral.
Since both Google and your customers don’t like slow websites, if you want to improve your search rankings, visibility, traffic, and conversions, you will have to improve your site speed. There are a number of reasons for slow load times, including the number of redirects your site has, how many images pages have to load, or your server’s load time. It can be a combination of many factors all combining to slow your site down. It’s hard to tell why without a site audit.
If you would like help determining why your website is slow to load or has low search rankings, contact Tom at 616-426-9303. We can help you boost your website’s speed, better engage your audience, and make more conversions. Contact Corporate Conversions today.
