3 Reasons Why Your Website Loading Speed is important in 2019

3 Reasons Why Your Website Loading Speed is important in 2019

September 14, 2019 by Brandon Boo

Why is it so important for a webpage to load fast?

Many of you may be thinking: “What’s the big deal, my business is so awesome (so am I), I’m sure people will wait for me”.

Does a website’s loading speed really make such a big difference?

Yes, it makes a big difference! User experience, search rankings, sales and conversions are affected!

Essentially, a slow website is equivalent to shutting the front door on customers, right in their face.

It’s the same feeling you’ll get when you entered the shop like 1 minute after the store closed, and got “invited” out…

Here’s 3 reasons why a website’s load speed is important.

1. It’s the first impression you make.

First impressions are vital in life, be it in the physical world, or the digital world.

Website visitors who could buy from you at some point, instantly judge you sub-consciously when the visit your website for the first time, before getting any visual input from your website (besides the white loading screen).

If your website loads fast, you’ve instantly made a strong first impression.

If your website load speed is within 1 second, that's the best you can ever ask for.

It’s pure psychology that has been conditioned in us since the advance of the internet.

Fast websites = professional and reliable, and speed = efficiency, trust, and confidence.

A slow website firstly annoys us, and then we start to think that the brand behind the website is also probably slow, sloppy and inefficient.

It’s difficult to turn around negative first impressions, as we human beings are naturally biased to be negative.

You don’t get a second chance when it comes to user experience, unless you've the necessary marketing activities and advertising budget to bombard them with repeated exposures to your content (think of search ads, social media posts, emails etc).

2. We want things fast and now! Better if it already arrived yesterday in the mail...

With the internet, high speed processors in our smartphones, as well as search engines (think Google, Yahoo, Bing), we are used to high speed webpages and results.

We expect fast website loading speed, and since it takes 2 seconds or less for Google to give us 10 results, we sub-consciously expect that for all our web interactions as well.

When we're moving around, we tend to expect things to be fast as well!

When it comes to well-known and authority sites, some people may be willing to wait longer, especially if you're one of the giants (think Facebook, Instagram or Amazon).

Unfortunately, for small businesses and start-ups, you don’t have that luxury, and it's always better to get a head start.

3. Conversion rates gets mauled by slow websites

Say 40% of people will abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Now, let’s say 1000 people visit your site every month. If your site takes 4 seconds to load (still not too bad), you lose 400 potential exposures!

Think of that as 400 customers who could have walked into your store and browsed your products.

They didn’t even get through the front door, because you slammed the door in their face!

And say just on average, 10% of those customers who enters your shop purchases something, you just lost 40 actual sales transactions.

This isn’t just a theory. The biggest companies in the world has tested this out.

10 years ago (before Facebook and Instagram became so big), Google discovered that a 0.5 seconds delay in website load speed caused a 20% drop in traffic.

Amazon also discovered that 100 milliseconds increments in page load speed would also result in substantial and costly drops in revenues

Unless you have so much traffic or revenue, or that you are okay with losing revenue, please keep an eye on your website load speed.

How do you improve your website’s load speed?

To make sure your server speed is up to standard, check out this tool that I've always used to test webpages' load speed.

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Tip #1: Don't worry if your 'Load Time' on the tool is longer than 3 seconds.

User's perception of load speed is highly affected by what we call 'above-the-fold' content.

Basically, what we’re concerned about here is how long does it take for visible content to load on their screens?

Your entire webpage may take 7 seconds to load, but if your 'above-the-fold' content takes only 2 seconds to load, that's still alright!

Tip #2: If your website is running on WordPress, be sure to find out how to specifically optimise your WordPress sites for performance.

Here's the things you should take note of in order of importance:

a) Web Hosting: Don't choose the cheapest webhosting.

Your website is hosted on datacentres with hardware that has been virtually compartmentalised (think of it as office buildings and cubicles).

Cheaper webhosting companies often overload their servers with too many websites. (Somewhat like sharing your toilet with 10 neighbours all at once, yuck!)

Your Web Hosting is one of the best/worse decisions you can ever make to affect your website load speed.

b) Location of Datacentre that you host your website on:

Say you've managed to sign up with a good webhost, it'll be good if the datacentre is close to the majority of your website's visitors. (It's pretty annoying to have to walk 1km to the nearest washroom.)

Of course, this can be improved with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), something that we'll cover another day.

c) WordPress Themes and Plugins that are coded for performance:

Not all themes and plugins are coded in the same manner and optimised for performance.

Some themes and plugins may be too bloated with features that you do not use, taking up extra resources on your webhost.

At other times, the themes and plugins may no longer be actively developed/updated by the authors, which results in outdated features inefficient use of precious webhosting resources.

Tip #3: Keep your image sizes small

Know the difference between high resolution images (150 DPI/PPI or 300 DPI/PPI), or web resolution images.

If your images don't need to be printed out in the real world, stick to 96DPI/PPI or slightly less.

Higher resolution images won't make your images look better on webpages, it's more of a balance between the image dimensions (width and height in pixels), as well as the compression of those images.

Aim for most images to be around 50kb - 200kb in size, with the larger full screen images pushing up to 250kb at most.

If your images are too large, your webpage's file size gets larger, and it takes longer for users to download data from your webhost or CDN.

Remember, small images give you better website load speed.

Speed really matters

Lack of speed annoys, pisses off your potential customers, and causes you to lose sales.

Always measure the impact that additional features, images or the latest 'floating' notification you want to have, against the webpage load speed and user experience of your website.

If all this is too much for you or your team to add on to the daily never-ending pile of tasks you already have on hand, my suggestions is to get help from the experts.

Whether you choose to hire a full-time/part-time employee or choose to engage a professional vendor to support you, always keep an eye on your website load speed!

Cheers.

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Priyanka

Thank you very much for the information, helped me greatly to improve my knowledge about website speed.

Teeka

Oh no my website loading is amount 8-9seconds….i need to work on it .

Capitaljoblink

Thank you for providing this knowledge I was searching for this information.
Please provide some more information regarding jobs.
<a href=”https://capitaljoblink.ca/”>Staffing Solutions jobs in Brampton Etobicoke</a>

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