As your website has grown, do the pages take an age to load?
Has your site become so complex that making any changes requires a huge amount of forward planning? In fact, is the site’s slow loading speed holding your revenues to ransom?
Numerous studies have been carried out on website speeds from Google, Shopzilla, AOL and many others, and their findings all agree in that the faster your website loads:
1. People will spend more time on it and be less likely to leave
2. People will more secure and more inclined to buy
3. Your revenues will increase significantly
Can a faster site make more money?
Very likely!
Shopzilla, the global price comparison site carrying over 100M products, found that as the business evolved, the sheer complexity and increasing lack of flexibility to alteration were starting to cost it dearly. Over 18 months they gradually rebuilt their site where upload speed was a prime design consideration.
Was it worth it?
Load times decreased from 8 seconds to less than 1 second. Conversion rates rose almost immediately from 7% to 12%. Page views went up 25% and top line revenues increased 10%. On a site making $M’s per day, this was significant.
Site speed and user satisfaction
People hate slow browsers. As a test, in June 2009, Google deliberately slowed their processing speed by around 300 milliseconds to a test group of users to see if it made a difference. What they found was at slower speeds, that users undertook far fewer search sessions. More importantly, even when site speeds returned to normal, the test group continued to search less frequently.
So if your site is slow loading, people learn and remember this, and are less inclined to use it again because it’s not delivering a great experience.
Can an increased site speed improve search ranking?
In 2010, Google announced it would be using site speed as a ranking signal and now uses analytics to track a website’s speed, comparing it to that of its immediate peer group. A slow loading site could be penalised because it would be considered as being behind the game line.
When you know that Google rewards sites with the most users, the more page views, best conversion rates and lowest abandonment rates, then as site speed influences all of these you don’t have to be Einstein to work out the effect it can exert - albeit indirectly.
Simple is the new clever
If you know your pages are not loading quickly it could be hurting your revenues. Removing complexity is in line with the general trend in website design and development of “simple being the new clever”. Determining speed, flexibility and quality should occur in the design decision stage of website construction.
Increasing site speed is not automatically going to bring in better revenues but it could certainly be a significant factor in overcoming the issues holding back your website performance - and your own decision in continuing to live with a slow loading website.
Source: Philip Dixon, VP Shopzilla, Shopzilla site redo. Youtube