Website loading speed is quickly becoming one of the most important factors webmasters and marketers have to focus on. This is mainly because around 50% of site visitors only wait for the content to appear on a page for 2 seconds. After that, they just look for the information they want somewhere else.
If you are still wondering why loading speed is so important for websites, ESBO highlights the reasons that you should always have in the back of your head.
Loading Speed Is Your First Impression
Most website visitors make a close to instant judgment about what they see. When the site loads fast, you make a very good first impression. This is because user experience becomes positive for the reader. Many think that when things to fast, the business is professional.
When the site loads slowly, visitors end up thinking that the page is insecure, untrustworthy, and unsafe. Turning around a negative first impression is not at all something simple to do.
People Expect Speed
We all demand and expect very fast loading times. In fact, 40% of people end up abandoning pages when they load in over three seconds. Also, 85% of people visiting your site with a mobile device want the page to load much faster than if they were to use the desktop PC.
The reason for this demand for speed is that we are not patient when we are moving. Quick results are expected because there are so many other things that we have to do. When accessing a large site like Facebook or Google, you might wait a little bit longer. But when you visit a new site, patience is usually very thin.
Providing A Good User Experience
Site owners and marketers talk a lot about UX design and user experience for everything from static HTML pages to WordPress. This is because they are so important. Very good UX design implies creating the best possible experience for your visitors. The 2 main factors that create the desired positive user experience are:
- Offering data very fast
- Offering visitors exactly what they expect to find
As a result, loading speed becomes a priority for websites when the goal is to deliver the best possible user experience. A failure to do this leads to frustration and people leaving.
Increased Conversions
Because such a large percentage of your visitors might leave as the website loads slowly, it is easy to understand that slow websites can drastically lower your conversion rates. Since people are being driven away, sales are also driven away.
Just think about the fact that Amazon concluded that if the site would be slower by 1 second, it would lose a huge $1.6 billion in revenues during the duration of a year. For a smaller business, this would not be so much, but it can be enough to create problems, especially since Amazon is a brand that is trusted and a highly recognizable company.
Basically, if you want to make money with your site through sales or even advertising, you need to make sure that content loads as fast as possible.
Author: Boris Dzhingarov is digital nomad travelling the world. He is the CEO of ESBO ltd.
