Nowadays, every business must have a website. There are simply too many benefits to gain from a website, while not having one puts you behind the competition.
Studies show that 90% of people look up information about a business before visiting it. We can think of a website as the face of a business. It attracts customers and provides all the information. So, a website should leave a good impression.
This is especially true for e-commerce websites. As online stores get 3 times the economic growth of traditional stores, many website owners choose to sell their products online. The customers can shop from home while the business can sell in a much larger area.
But what happens if this online face of your business is too slow to load? You risk looking unprofessional, for one. You will also turn away more than a few customers.
We’ve already mentioned that most people look up a business first. Well, if they end up on your website, they will want all the info quickly.
Research compiled by HostingTribunal confirms as much – 40% of people wait 4 seconds for a website to load before abandoning it. Longer load times also mean that visitors who stay open fewer total pages. So, if your website is too slow, you risk potential customers not seeing everything you offer or, even worse, not seeing anything at all.
This concerns particularly much website owners who sell their product exclusively online. Side effects of longer load times include decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty. This means 7% fewer conversions per second of additional delay. Also, 79% of dissatisfied users don’t return to an online store, and 43% goes to the competitor.
Load speed during checkout is essentially important. If checkout experience is too slow, customers worry about the safety of their transaction. While customers rarely abandon their shopping carts in traditional stores even when there is a line, a 2-second delay can cause up to 87% abandonment rates online. To put things in perspective, if you added up the value of all abandoned transactions worldwide, you would get $18 billion loss in revenue per year.
This affects local businesses as well. While local internet searches might bring in less traffic than a regular search engine queries, they have higher conversion rates. So, if you are a lawyer and someone from your town searches for legal offices nearby, Google will lead them right to you. But if your website is too slow, you might lose a certain customer. Even worse, they may just go to the competing legal office.
It is clear as day that operating a website properly can reel in and secure numerous clients. But if your website is slow, this will cast a bad reflection on your business. So it is in the best interest of business owners to improve the speed of their websites as much as they can.
If you want to learn more about website speed or see how these improvements affect businesses, check out the infographic below.
Your Site Too Slow? What Could Influence That?
Source: https://hostingtribunal.
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