Monday, April 14, 2014

Slow Website Loading Speed Can Kill Your Online Store Income



The loading speed of your website is one of the most important components in its user experience.  Your website’s performance, in terms of revenue, can be impacted severely if your website doesn’t load quickly.  You need to capture the website visitor’s attention from the outset.  If you don’t do so, you stand to lose considerable online store income.  In the words of Google, “Faster sites create happy users”.  If you want to see an increase in your online store income, it is important that your website loads fast. 

Numerous studies and research have shown that a slow website loading speed can kill your online store income.  It would drive away customers and lead to loss of reputation.  Over time, the traffic you attract to your website would also decrease, further hampering your bottom-line.  According to Amazon, improving your site’s loading speed by just 100m/s can lead to an increase in sales of 1%.  The numbers are staggering and quite clearly show that the loading speed of your website is going to have a direct impact on the profits of your online business. 

And it is not just by driving away customers that this occurs.  Once a person clicks away from your website in frustration (you can’t expect them to have any other feeling if they were waiting for your site to load and it didn’t!), they aren’t going to ‘recommend’ or ‘refer’ your business.  Rather, it is more likely that they dissuade people from shopping at your online store.  Consider this fact: they aren’t going to buy anything for themselves and will further harm your online store income. 

The only thing that you will see increasing is your website’s bounce rate, something every webmaster dreads.  If your business depends on visitors to stick around and make purchases, this is the last thing you would want to see.  Plus, you won’t attract repeat visitors anymore.  Even the channels through which you have been attracting visitors might put their hands up.  This would further reduce your online store income. 

Don’t be surprised if the average time people spend on your site increases.  This has nothing to do with the quality on offer. This is only because they have to wait longer for your website to load.  Even if the time spent on site increases, it won’t result in your online store income increasing.  Keep in mind that a person who has waited for your site to load before losing patience and leaving is going to be more frustrated than someone who just waited 2 seconds before clicking away.

This will impact your online store income even further if you have a mobile website.  As you would know, mobile connections are slower.  Therefore, your website would take even longer to load on a mobile device.  You will lose online store income from that platform too. 

As you can see, there is no light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to slow website loading speed. Unless you manage to improve it, it will kill your online store income.

1 comment:

  1. Slow sites can kill. Proper cacheing, a CDN and proper expiring headers can all help.

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