Why Your Slow Website is Costing You Money (And What To Do About It)

Do you know how long it takes for your website to load? If the answer is “no” then your website could be losing you thousands in missed customers.

Internet users are notoriously impatient, 3 seconds is all you have to capture your audience’s attention, if your site takes longer than that to load 40% will bounce before ever setting eyes on your website! Which is a major problem for online businesses, think of how many more conversions or sales your website could be making if it had 40% more traffic.

And that’s not all, here’s some worrying statistics for owners of slow websites:

• For every one second delay in page speed, conversions decrease by 16%
• Research from Google finds that 53% of mobile users will bounce if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• Customers who claim to be dissatisfied with the user experience of a website are 79% less likely to buy from it again

However, It’s not all doom and gloom! While the above stats are indeed true they also provide an opportunity for websites that load in under 3 seconds.

Having a website that runs faster than your competitors will allow you to raise your own conversion rate, generate more sales, and cement your brand as trustworthy. If this sounds appealing to you, take a look at Atomic’s PageSpeed optimization service to increase the performance of your site and keep users engaged with your brand.

Famous Brands Who Benefitted From Optimising Their Page Speed

It isn’t just the websites of small businesses or solopreneurs who benefit immensely from shaving a couple of seconds off their page loading time. It’s estimated that for every one delay to their website loading, Amazon loses $1.6 billion in sales accumulatively over the year!

Regardless of whether they love your brand or not, internet users won’t tolerate poor loading speeds. Below are some examples of famous brands who’ve managed to generate more sales by improving their site performance.

BMW

High-end car manufacturer BMW wanted a website that mirrored its motors: built for speed. They felt the current site was hurting their brand image with its slow performance as it wasn’t providing the user experience that would be expected from a luxury brand.

To put things right, in 2019 BMW commissioned a complete redesign of their site. To speed up their mobile performance they committed to creating AMP versions of all their content. AMP (accelerated mobile pages) is a Google endorsed project that displays mobile pages faster by stripping their HTML back to its basics.

The results were staggering, site speed improved by 300% and with it brought a 27% increase in mobile users to the BMW sales website.

Pfzier

Alongside pioneering Coronavirus research, Pfzier has around 40 brands in its portfolio to market and manage. After realising that they hadn’t dedicated enough time to the performance of the websites in their stable, Pfzier launched an ambitious plan to fix them all at once.

By developing a single high-speed structure consisting of no functionality or images that would raise load speed over 5 seconds, Pfzier had a website design template which it could quickly and competently apply to the brands under its umbrella.

This quickly proved to be a wise investment as almost immediately, their site speeds became 38% faster, with one site in particular bringing its loading speed down from 21 seconds to just 5. And with the increase in speed came a 20% reduction in bounce rates and 9% increase in conversions!

Ebay

Ebay’s story is fascinating because it highlights how even a small increase to page speed leads to a bigger bottom line.

Differing from BMW and Pfzier, eBay opted to optimize their site instead of completely abandoning the existing design. They compiled a full audit of the slow pages on their site and implemented page speed optimisation best practicses:

• Removing all unused Javascript and CSS
• Image compression and cropping
• Moving big elements below the fold
• Experimenting with page caching settings

Interestingly some of Ebay’s product pages only made a 0.1 second improvement in loading time, while this might seem modest these pages still went on to achieve a 0.5% increase in ‘add to cart’ count. Thus, highlighting the fine margins that are at play when trying to grow online conversions. Every microsecond helps to people in a hurry.

Investing in Your Website’s Speed is More Essential Than Ever (Google Has Made Sure of That)

By far, the most important user experience metric you should be measuring is page speed. Lowering the time your site takes to load is an easy way to boost conversions on your site without having to change any content.

If you’ve been thinking about speeding up a WordPress site that you owne, there’s never been a better time to do it than right now! Google has announced a major algorithm update for May 2021. This update is known as the page experience update because it is making two elements related to page speed core ranking factors.

The purpose of this update is to lower the rankings of sites which have a high loading time (Google’s recommendation is under 2.5 seconds), simply because Google believes they deliver a poor user experience. If your site is slow to load, it’s now not just costing you customers, but also your organic traffic!

To stop losing sales and to protect your search positions throughout the May Google update, reach out to Atomic about our PageSpeed Optimisation Service.

We’ll turbocharge your site so that it loads faster than ever before whilst meeting Google’s standards and delivering a browsing experience that will keep your visitors coming back!