The Benefits of Having a Fast Website
Is your website quick enough?
When it comes to website design, there are a million and one things that you have to get right – especially if you want good SEO (search engine optimization)! From choosing the right keywords for your metadata to picking a colour palette that will entice users and stick with your brand image, it’s definitely tricky.
But, one of the most vital parts of a good business website that’s often overlooked is speed. Why is this so important and how can it help you?
Read on the discover the benefits of a speedy website.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate
In website development, your bounce rate is the number of people who click onto one page of your website but click off before exploring any further. So, if you were to land on the home page of a company website only to realise you’d clicked on the wrong company and go back to the search results before taking a look around, that would add to their bounce rate. There are a lot of things that increase bounce rate, but one of the most important is speed.
If your website takes too long to load, users are going to exit it – it’s as simple as that! Pages that load within two seconds see a bounce rate of just 9% on average, which is pretty good. But if your site takes just three more seconds to load, that rate suddenly increases to a whopping 38%, which is not so good.
The point is that every single second that your site takes to load is going to increase your bounce rate and reduce the number of users you have exploring your website.
On the other hand, if you optimize website speed and reduce the time your site takes to load, your bounce rate should go down! That’s great news for your business as the more pages they browse, the more chances you have to convert them into paying customers.
Boost Website Traffic
A speedy website doesn’t just reduce the number of people leaving your site, it can also attract more attention in the first place. There are numerous cases that prove this link, like the statistics released by Pinterest. They reduce the wait times on their site by 40% and saw web traffic increase by 15%; and who would say no to 15% more users?
High-performing sites not only retain more users, but they attract them too. If you’re not getting the search traffic you’d like then it could be wise to check your speed and see if it’s working for or against you.
Increase Customer Conversions
Once you have a lovely bunch of users on your website, you don’t want to let them slip through the net. Now is the time to convert them, which simply means convincing users to do something you want them to, be it buy a product, sign-up to your mailing list, or invest in your business. By improving your website speed, you might just see your conversions skyrocket.
Mobify released some great statistics showing just how much load speed affects your conversion rate. For every 100 milliseconds they decreased load speeds on their home page, they saw an increase of 1.11% in session-based conversion. That brought them in an extra $376,789 in revenue in just one year.
They also discovered that decreasing the load speed of their checkout page had an even greater effect. By dropping speeds by 100 milliseconds, they increased session-based conversion by 1.55%, earning them an additional $526,147 every year.
Those figures show that this isn’t just about catching a couple more users. Your load speeds could end up affecting your revenue massively, and to make sure that’s a positive outcome you need to create a site that’s fast.
Improve Your User Experience
Did you know that waiting for a website to load is more stressful than waiting in line at a store? Internet users are notoriously impatient, and if you’re making them wait they won’t be happy! This can have a huge effect on your user experience, making your browsers less satisfied with their experience with your brand.
This can be devastating for businesses. With so much competition out there, your branding can make or break you, and if your user experience is poor then it’s going to be the latter.
There’s only so much bad performance that people will take before they simply leave. If that happens, the chances of them ever coming back will be pretty slim.
Give Your SEO a Boost
Search engine optimization is crucial to getting seen online. If you don’t know what it is, in the simplest terms it’s a bunch of techniques that help push you up the search engine rankings for relevant searches, making your website more visible to your target audience.
From local SEO to global SEO, your load speeds will have a large impact. Search engines automatically favor websites that load quicker and will bump them up the ranks. This is because they know that users will be happier if the website loads fast, and the search engine wants to keep their users happy!
On the other hand, if your website loads at snail speed, you’re likely to be pushed back down the ranks and become less visible. It’s not just your load speed that directly affects your SEO, either, but all of the perks we’ve talked about above. If your bounce rate is too high and your user experience is poor, you’re going down.
What Next?
If you want to improve your SEO, gain more traffic, and convert more users into paying customers, it’s time to optimize your load speeds. Take a look at our speed optimization services today to find out more. Improving your load speeds on your own is tricky, but with our expertise, we’ll make it a breeze.
