Are You Losing Sales Because Your Website Is Slow?

Have you ever visited your website to see how fast it loads? In this day and age where people have more things to do and more articles to read, they just don't have the time to sit around for even 10 seconds and wait for your website to load in their browser. This could adversely affect your sales and readership.

An article In the August 2012 issue of Website Magazine breaks down the intricacies of what is called web performance optimization (WPO). This concept of WPO came about as more and more companies wanted to publish a variety of media on their websites. The bottom line is that WPO enhances the user experience, thus increasing traffic to your site, which ultimately means more sales for you. What website would you rather buy from: one that is slow to load or one that allows you to find what you want and to be able to purchase it quickly?

Steve Souders shares these statistics about page load time:

• Bing – A page that was 2 seconds slower resulted in a 4.3% drop in revenue/user.
• Google – A 400 millisecond delay caused a 0.59% drop in searches/user.
• Yahoo! – A 400 milliseconds slowdown resulted in a 5-9% drop in full-page traffic.

What many people don't know is that delivering content on the Internet consists of very sophisticated technology. If your site contains multi-media information such as text, graphics, video, ecommerce, and downloads, it's important that the communication time between the server and the web browser is done very quickly.

As you're probably well aware, faster and better will keep your business more competitive. Make your customers wait to do something on your site and they'll click away to your competition in a heartbeat. That’s why it’s vital to continuously monitor your website to ensure that pages load fast.

So, what goes into creating a speedy website? This article over at the Yahoo! Developer Network offers up 35 best practices for making web pages fast. Google also has their version of web performance best practices. Keep in mind that when optimizing site performance, you have to take into account all the different devices and browsers that are viewing your website.

If all of this seems overwhelming, we’re happy to take a look at your website to ensure that it is loading properly and quickly!

==========================

Like this article? Subscribe to our blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay updated on new blog posts and resources.