Considering we’ve all visited- or worse, exited- a website due to its speed, it is absolutely worth investigating how a slow or poorly performing website will affect your organization’s bottom line. Google has provided some interesting case studies to illustrate how website performance affects the success of any online venture.
Let’s start with the bad news. A website that is slow and buggy can lead to users abandoning your website en mass. For example, the BBC found that for every additional second that it took their site to load, they would lose an additional 10 percent of users. Also, DoubleClick found that 53 percent of mobile of mobile site visits were abandoned if one page took longer than only three seconds to load. Clearly, users are impatient. They are all too eager to abandon your website if it doesn’t load quickly enough for them.
That said, there isn’t all bad news. Even making a minor change can significantly impact the user experience on your website. For instance, Pinterest increased search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15 percent after they reduced perceived wait times to their website by 40 percent. By reducing average page load time by a mere 850 milliseconds, COOK was able to increase conversions by seven percent, decrease bounce rates by seven percent, and increase pages per session by ten percent.
What does this all mean? It’s relatively simple. A slow website leads to users (and potential customers) to visit the websites of your competitors. In other words, slow websites have a negative effect on your company’s revenue. A study by Mobify even found that a 100 millisecond decrease in checkout page load speed led to a 1.55 percent increase in session-based conversion, which ultimately led to an average annual revenue increase of approximately $380,000.
As you can see, you and your organization can lose some serious revenue if your website is performing poorly or isn’t performing at all. Even if you think that your website performance is adequate, focusing on the speed and performance of your website can lead to more sales and higher profits.
There are, of course, ways to test website (like this Google tool), but since your website is one of your company’s most important resources, we recommend you invest in its maintenance properly.
