You probably already know that if your website’s slow, that’s A Bad Thing.
You’ll have heard the usual stats about site speed; that if your page hasn’t loaded within two seconds, your visitor will be off like a shot, that kind of thing.
And if you’ve ever used a slow website yourself (and the chances are you have), you’ll know how important performance is to the user experience.
For a while now, Google has included site loading speed in its algorithm, so it’s official that if your site’s slow, it’ll have an impact on your search results.
But the link between site speed and its impact on bottom line performance has maybe been a bit less obvious.
Until now…
For starters, here are four great stats that prove just how important it is:
• By bringing average response time down from 4.8 to 3.95 seconds, COOK improved conversion rate by 7% (from 3.82% to 4.09%).
• When AliExpress reduced page load time by 36%, the number of orders placed on the site increased by 10.5%.
• When the Financial Times artificially added a one-second delay to their page load time, users viewed 4.9% fewer articles on average.
• During Obama’s 2012 campaign for the United States presidency, improved performance on the campaign’s donation page led to a 14% increase in donation conversions.
Need more stats? Fill your boots at wpostats.com.
The big news to take away here is that it’s not enough to think “oh, our site’s ok – so that box is ticked” – each improvement in performance directly equates to an improvement to your bottom line.
How to check your website’s real performance
Because offices tend to have better internet connections, and because that’s where many of us still view our own websites, often we’re used to seeing pages load relatively quickly. It’s easy to forget that users in other areas with slower connections, or on different devices might experience much slower page load times.
There’s a free tool called GTmetrix that you can use to get a real-world view of how quickly your site loads on different devices, in a variety of locations. I admit it doesn’t look too great (maybe I should get in touch with them to see if they need our help?), but pop your site’s address in to the tool and see how it comes out. You can also do a comparison against your competitors!
The Tomango team has been designing high-performing websites for businesses like yours for over 15 years.
If you’d like to talk to us about how to improve the performance of your website and make a difference to the profitability of your business, get in touch and find out how we can help…