Website speed has become quite a big deal over the years. Back in the days of dial-up, speed wasn’t all that important. Sure, you would try to maintain some level of performance, but nobody expected incredible speeds.
Today, it’s a different story. Users want pages to load within seconds. In fact, any page that takes over 3 seconds to load is too slow, according to both ordinary users and experts.
Unfortunately, many business owners are not aware that speed can really make or break a website. Although a website is practically a must-have if you want to run a successful business in 2019, business owners often neglect speed.
How a Good Website’s Speed Can Help Your Business?
Website speed can be a great asset to any company and speed is now a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop sites. Here we’ll cover how your business might benefit from speed improvement.
1. Stronger Online Presence
One of the main reasons for dedicating a site to your business is marketing. You want your website to serve as an advertisement and bring in new customers. That’s why you want to get as many people to your site as you can.
Speed plays a massive role here. As search engines are a huge driver of traffic, doing well in search rankings is crucial for attracting new visitors.
Research shows faster websites perform consistently better in search rankings.
It means you can get more customers simply by improving website speed. Many companies have already done it. For instance:
When SmartFurniture.com improved their website speed, they climbed two positions in search rankings and got a 20% boost in organic search traffic.
Speed influences paid search traffic, too. Your ads might get shown less often and cost more if your website is slow. Therefore, even if you rely on paid traffic, you should improve your site performance before investing any more money into ads.
2. Don’t Forget About Mobile Performance
It is a part of SEO as well. However, mobile website speed is absolutely crucial, and it deserves a section of its own.
Since last year, Google has expanded the “make the web faster” policy to cover mobile websites. Speed is now a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop sites.
It poses a serious problem for most website owners. While most traffic comes from mobile devices, mobile websites are significantly slower than desktop ones. This means that businesses can miss out on a big chunk of potential customers if their mobile websites are slow.
Another thing to consider here is mobile-first indexing. Starting in 2018, Google’s ranking system sees the mobile version of a site as the primary one.
It does not mean you must have a mobile version of your website. As long as you use a responsive design, it won’t matter.
However, if you have a separate, poorly performing mobile website, or if your site works only on desktop, it’s significantly harder to get good search rankings.
It’s necessary for your site to be mobile-friendly. Otherwise, even your rankings for desktop searches may suffer. Your business will miss out on a lot of potential clients this way.
You can dedicate a mobile app to your business to take some pressure off. Even so, a fast website can help you promote your business online and get more users to download your app.
3. Better User Experience
This part is simple. Users don’t enjoy waiting. If a website takes too long to load, they get impatient and want to leave. Therefore, experts recommend keeping your load times under 3 seconds.
So, what happens when a user comes to a slow site?
Chances are, they’ll leave. Statistics show websites that load in three seconds have a 32% higher bounce rate than those that load in one second. If the load time goes up to five seconds, the probability of bouncing is 90% higher.
Bouncing means that users leave after only opening one page. It is a good indicator that something is wrong with a website. Usually, it’s low-quality content or poor performance.
Even when a user stays, faster speed is an asset. If a website is fast, users spend more time there and view more pages. They’re also more likely to come back in the future.
Faster websites are much better at keeping users interested. Any entrepreneur should know that engagement plays a big role in running a business. If a potential customer doesn’t engage with your website, they are less likely to purchase your goods or services.
4. More Conversions
If you dedicate a site to your business, there will almost always be some action you want users to carry out. It could be purchasing a product or service, signing up to get updates about your offers, or perhaps downloading an app. Whatever the end goal, if a user completes it, you can consider this a successful conversion.
As you can probably guess, speed influences your website’s conversion rate. Customer experience is better on a faster website. This makes users more open to suggestions, including offers to buy products.
Having a slow website has the same negative impact as having a bad reputation. Users won’t trust you if your site is slow.
If you’d like to know the stats, slower websites lose about 7% of their conversions per second of loading delay. You can easily lose half of your profits or more if you don’t keep an eye on your load times.
In turn, a faster website means a higher percentage of customers will convert. If you want a successful and profitable business, this is just one more reason to improve your load times.
Conclusion
All in all, website speed is now more important than ever. Even though average load times have seen improvement in 2018, most websites still have a long way to go. That makes it the perfect time to beat the traffic and capitalize on speed improvement before everybody else jumps on the bandwagon.
You now know exactly how speed influences your business. The next step is to learn the basics of speed optimization and implement them on your site. It is not a complicated process, and your business can only benefit from it.
Sr. Content Strategist
Meet Manish Chandra Srivastava, the Strategic Content Architect & Marketing Guru who turns brands into legends. Armed with a Masters in Mass Communication (2015-17), Manish has dazzled giants like Collegedunia, Embibe, and Archies. His work is spotlighted on Hackernoon, Gamasutra, and Elearning Industry.
Beyond the writer’s block, Manish is often found distracted by movies, video games, AI, and other such nerdy stuff. But the point remains, If you need your brand to shine, Manish is who you need.
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