Why your website loading speed matters for your interior design business
16 Sep 2019 / Brandon Boo
More than ever, today’s users who browse the internet from their smartphones (by extension, your customers) are very impatient.
The fact that human attention is finite and multitasking is becoming the norm means that if your website is not loading fast enough, you’d be losing a lot of money.
It doesn’t matter how established or how small your interior design website is with its fancy images and well written copywriting... no one wants to deal with a sluggish website.
According to this article on Neil Patel’s blog, 40 percent of web users claim they abandon websites that load in more than 3 seconds, and 47 percent of web visitors report that they expect web pages to load within 2 seconds.
All businesses whose potential customers uses a smartphone (practically almost everyone in Singapore) suffers the consequence of a slow loading website. If your interior design website loads slowly, you won’t be immune to those consequences.
Potential customers looking for interior designers in Singapore won’t wait too long before clicking the ‘back button’ and returning the search result page. That’s a client lost by you and gained by your competitors – which is not good at all.
Table of Contents
If your website loads slowly, you are wasting money on articles and digital advertising
We know that many Interior Design Companies love to advertise on AdWords and create blog content, and that takes significant time and financial resources.
Whenever we get the chance to meet a new client, one of the first things we do is to get website speed tests done on their homepage and contact page.
In this article, we will explain how a slow website negatively affects your interior design firm’s sales and online lead conversion, and how a fast website can boost your quotation requests and sales.
How a slow loading website affects your interior design firm’s business negatively
1) Website load speed affects SEO
One of the biggest ranking factors Google and the major search engines consider is your page load time.
The objective of a Search Engine such as Google/Yahoo is to provide information to their users, and one of their major concerns is doing it quickly with the best user experience.
If Google keeps sending their users to slow websites, users will be discouraged and thus turn to other search engines as well. And there’s only so many times a user will click through the results on Google/Yahoo before giving up.
Thus, they place websites that load quickly (an evidence of good user experience) ahead of those which load slowly.
2) Slow page load affects your website conversion rate
No one wants to give their job to “incompetent” companies. What your slow website page speed indirectly tells your visitors is that you are incompetent. That’s a harsh fact of today’s digital world.
As a business, you want to collect emails, phone contacts, and several other methods of opt-ins, as well as for customers to place orders.
You may not get any of those if your website load speed is slow as your web visitors do not have the time to wait for your page to load, view your content and follow your call to action.
Remember, numerous other companies are offering similar services, as well as paying advertising dollars to get traffic.
Visitors that can’t wait for your website to load will always choose to go to your competitors to get their jobs done.
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How a website that is developed and maintained properly improves your interior design firm’s quotation requests and sales
1) Improves user experience
Nothing repels visitors as much as a slow loading page. They’ll just go on to close the page and visit a competitor’s website.
This increases your bounce rate, and that has the chain effect of affecting your SEO efforts negatively.
If you are concerned about user experience, you must invest in top-quality user experience design.
There are several things to gain if the user experience on your website is of the highest quality.
A) Lower bounce rate:
Bounce rate affects search engine rankings. If people land on your website and leave the site immediately, Google may believe the information on your website is not helpful or may be irrelevant, and that affects your ranking.
Lower-ranking search results means you get less impressions and click-through traffic, consequently fewer customers and fewer sales.
If your interior design company’s website collects requests for quotations through your contact page, having a lower bounce rate means visitors actually browse around your website, increasing the chance of them reaching out to you on your contact page.
B) Lesser cart abandonment:
About 76% of shoppers abandon their cart, and never complete their purchase. That’s a staggering 76 out of every 100 shoppers.
For interior design companies or web retailers that sell some of their products online, cart abandonment affects their bottomline.
If you don’t have a smooth user experience for your website visitors, expect that number to be much higher.
2. Consistent design and branding elements
With the right color schemes, logo and text, potential customers who reach your website will trust your business and see you as a brand.
People buy into brands and experience – not products. A well developed and maintained website provides the necessary user experience that positions you as a brand and that alone is priceless.
Also, your customers are likely looking for an ID (interior design) firm to do a home renovation for their soon to be ready BTO HDB flat, or renovate one of their properties.
At least let your website give a good impression to potential customers in terms of the color and design elements.
3. Contribute to sales
A well developed and maintained website enables you to make additional sales.
Customers don’t just want to spend their money, they want to spend it in places they can trust.
One of the best ways to make a good first impression and build up trust is on your website.
Almost 80% of effort at marketing in digital spaces (content marketing / social media engagement / paid digital advertising) aims to drive traffic to your website.
If your website is well developed and maintained, it will provide the best user and customer experience. And with that, your interior design firm’s website can convert traffic that you work and pay so hard for, into sales enquiries, quotations and ultimately, sales.
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Why is your website’s loading speed slow?
There are many reasons why your website loads slower than it should. Below are a couple of reasons from our experience with clients’ websites.
1) Poorly designed website
It doesn’t matter if you have a WordPress website that cost $10000 bucks to setup back in 2015 during the time when the PIC scheme was popular in Singapore…
It could still be poorly setup, or perhaps the lack of management (or zero management) over the years contributed to your website’s speed today.
The use of themes that is not optimised for performance, or badly coded plugins may make your website slow.
If those themes or plugins are no longer maintained, it could also put your website at risk of hackers.
Image file sizes could be too large or high quality for website visitors. Typically images should be resized and optimized at 96DPI/PPI.
2) Cheap and Poor Performing Webhost
If you use a webhost who apportions too little resource to each shared hosting subscriber, you may experience a slow page load time.
What happens with shared hosting is that visitors who browse the website of the other users on the same server may cause your website to load slowly and may force your site to even go offline for a few minutes or hours.
3) You don’t use a CDN
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are services which allow you to host your website on servers in different parts of the world. When people browse your website from different areas, they are served from a server nearest to them.
The further a visitor is from your server, the longer it takes to load your website’s resources, thus slowing their browsing experience (more time waiting for stuff to load).
If you use a CDN service, your site is stored on various servers around the world, and users are served a copy of your site on servers closest to them.
4) Lack of Website Caching
Your website may also benefit from a caching plugin. This works similarly to a CDN but is quite different. A caching plugin serves a saved copy of your site on a user’s local device.
When a user browses your website from the same device more than once, they are shown contents that have been stored.
This ensures your server is not overworked as repeat users are no longer required to reload your entire website again and again for the same content.
However, you must ensure proper configuration of your caching plugin, as some pages that contains dynamic content (your cart and checkout pages) should not be cached.
Conclusion
There are many ways a slow loading page affects your interior design company’s website, and consequently your sales and bottom line.
Tackling them one by one will produce wonderful results, but before you do anything, one important thing to note is that you need to quantify these results (before and after).
We recommend using this website speed test tool to test the website load speed of your webpage before and after implementing a change.
You may also wish to explore some software or services that helps with performance monitoring of your interior design firm’s website loading speed.
By ensuring your website is properly developed and maintained, you will be able to improve the user experience of your website.
You will see improvements in your SEO efforts and website conversions (lower bounce rates, higher sessions duration).
Are you going to improve your interior design company’s website loading speed in 2019?
Yes i agree to most of the reasons. Thanks for blog. Love it
Teeka
I totally agree that slow pages kill the websites. It has a great influence on the website conversion rate as the visitors will close the website if they come across pages to load for ages. Thanks for providing these vital information.