Improve Your Bottom-Line With a Faster Website

Page speed first came to prominence with Google’s PageRank algorithm in the year 2010. This had a significant impact on SEO as well!

If you are of the view that page speed is not an important factor, then think again. Here are some industry benchmarks set by Google in 2018:

It is crucial for marketers to have faster websites for their business. Whether you want to promote your blog or have a full-fledged eCommerce store, speed matters. Faster is better.

According to Google, the average page load times have dropped by 7 seconds since 2017. However, a majority of the websites still take around 15 seconds to load and this is bad news.<>/p

Let’s face the truth. 53% of mobile visitors are likely to abandon their visit if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load.

The faster your website is, the higher its rank will be on Google SERPs. Fast sites equal happy users.

Additionally, with the rise of voice search, marketers should start focusing on its effect on search engine rankings. Voice search is 52% faster than text search and quick loading websites attain a higher ranking in voice search results.

(Additional Reading: You can learn about the impact of voice search in the era of digital transformation here.)

There is no denying the fact that eCommerce stores face a lot of competition. If you fail to provide a fast loading website then customers are likely to abandon their carts and leave.

Here are some stats on how the bounce rate increases when pages load slowly. (Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017)

Page load speeds have a direct impact on your bottom line. Amazon has found that every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales.

If we were to put numbers on it, Amazon’s test shows that they would lose $1.6 billion every year if their website speed slowed down by just one second.

Marketers around the world are investing their time to learn about this topic and working closely with the development teams to boost their page load speeds.

Let’s take a look at some really interesting facts about page speed that will paint a clear picture of why slow and steady won’t win the race in the world of digital marketing.

• Waiting for pages to load is the most annoying thing for 46% of users browsing the web on mobile
• Quick loading websites get 60% more page views than slower websites
• Users spend 70% more time on quick-loading websites as compared to slow websites
• Around 77% of websites on the web take more than 10 seconds to load
• Conversion rates can drop by 7% with a 100-millisecond delay in load time
• 52% of online buyers are loyal to a website if it loads quickly
• 79% of online buyers will not return if they have trouble with website performance
• Page speed has a direct impact on your Google Ads campaigns and quality score
• If buyers have a negative experience, 43% of them will visit a competitor’s website

Now that we have established that slow websites do more harm than good, you should focus on optimizing your website’s performance.

You can take a look at this list of best practices for website optimization to find new tricks.

Long-term detrimental effects of slow websites

“Speed equals more revenue”. A slow website will have detrimental effects on your business in the long-term.

To Wrap Up

If you are experiencing a high bounce rate but publish high-quality content on a regular basis, then there is definitely some issue with your page speed.

Prioritize fixing it. Start with something that can improve your website quickly. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) can be a good place to start. Learn more about the impact of AMPs through this infographic.

Are your digital marketing campaigns generating negative outcomes?