You spend dozens of hours planning your social media campaigns, your content and growing your audience in order to inspire them to invest in your brand. The problem is that no matter how strong a campaign, how perfect the content, the real key to converting sales is in the quality of your website. If your website is struggling to load in a reasonable amount of time, your brand will miss out on many sales and stifle your success.
Why Speed Matters
Every year, websites become larger in size. Sites contain more landing pages, more video, and more graphics. While website size has increased, Internet speeds have not. Mobile traffic is also growing, now accounting for more than half of website traffic. Even with faster phone speeds becoming more common, the average load time for a webpage on mobile is 15 seconds. That may sound low, but more than half of the visitors to your site will leave if they are forced to wait longer than 3 seconds.
To put that in perspective, if you have 100,000 visitors in a month and your site took 5 or more seconds to load, you’ll lose around 40% of your audience. That adds up to 40,000 potential customers who fled. Users also judge whether they want to purchase from a company based on their website experience. If they visit and leave frustrated once, chances are they won’t come back.
How Speed Effects Rankings
Another extremely important part of having fast load times is the effect on SEO. The faster your site loads, the better reputation your site has with Google. This is especially important when a potential customer becomes frustrated with your page load speed and simply hits the “back” button. Chances are, they will simply pick the next link in the search results, which means you are funneling traffic to your competitors.
Consider how much work you put into improving your SEO. The blogs you add weekly, the keyword research, and the ad budgets you have are all great ways to improve SEO, but a slow page can undo a great deal of that hard work.
There are numerous tools to test your website loading speed, and it’s important to periodically test your site to make sure you’re hitting that 3-5 second sweet spot. If not, it’s time to reevaluate your webpage and get it working at the speed that it should be at.
Website speed is incredibly valuable, to the degree that 79% of online shoppers say they won’t go back to a website if they have struggled with its load speeds.
Are you ready to launch a website that builds your credibility, converts visitors into customers, and generates the results you’ve been looking for?
CLICK HERE to learn more about launching a new website with KWSM.
