Are you a website owner or blogger? Are you wondering why people always visit your site once but never again in a thousand years? The answer to your search might just be in the fact that your site loads slower than a tired tortoise…
On the internet, people expect rapid results. That’s why they would rather search the meaning of a word than browse through a dictionary. They need fast solutions to their problems.
It’s one thing to have the answers and solutions to their questions and problems, it’s another thing to give it to them, quickly enough.
So, What Exactly Does A Slow Loading Time Cost You?
Well, might we interest you in some numbers courtesy to Hosting Tribunal?
It would interest you to know that 39% of people who visit your site will leave immediately if images on the site, or the site itself, does not load fast.
To put that into perspective, say you have 100 visitors per day and you have a slow site. 39 people will leave your site and 61 will stay. Still cool right? Well, scale that up to having a million visits per day with 390, 000 people leaving. 390, 000 potential customers, lost and never to return. Tragic.
“I have an e-commerce site, I don’t mind a few less views as long as sales are still up” Ha-ha! You think you escaped? Sad, but it’s worse for you. 51% of customers that visit e-commerce sites do not make any purchase because something somewhere was “loading”.
This is because, people are naturally more concerned when their money is involved. Wouldn’t you?
Things like “check-out” and “online transactions” are already a partial scare to people. Now add that loading sign and that buyer might just add to the 40% of people who abandon sites, never to return. And all because the site is slow.
An average of 18 billion dollars is lost every year on e-commerce sites’ shopping carts because the site was “loading” … If you do not want your products to be included in the “reject 18 billion”, then your site has to load very fast.
Fun fact: Amazon would lose 1% of its customers if it increases its loading time by just one second. Do a quick Google search on how many customers Amazon has for you to get how many people will stop using the site just because it’s one second slower.
How About Customer Satisfaction?
As a business owner, your top priority is the satisfaction of your customers. The only reason a customer will come to your site again is if they were satisfied with the value you gave them, be it either goods or services.
Now, we know that you have top-quality products (goods or services) to offer your customers. However, it is also important to get that information to them as quickly as you can. People spend so much time on the internet and are easily bothered when the internet is slow.
A one second delay in a site decreases a customers’ satisfaction by 16%. Imagine if your site delays for 5 seconds, 80% of your customers’ satisfaction is instantly lost. And unless your products are perfect, more points of the 20% left will drop.
You don’t expect someone who was 10% satisfied to return to your site.
The faster you can give them what they want, the higher your chances of keeping them. In fact, people on their phones have even less patience. With social media apps and notifications everywhere, you don’t need to wonder why.
74% of people viewing your site on their phones will leave if the site hasn’t loaded in 5 seconds. And 44% of that 74% will text all their friends, or tell them by other means, how bad your site is. In this new age, there is bad PR, we repeat, there is bad PR! And you know nothing spreads faster than bad news.
Even a company as big as “Google”, is not safe. If Google increases its loading time by 0.5 seconds, it will receive 25% less searches than it presently does.
How Fast Should My Site Be?
Now you’re asking the right questions. We’ll go straight to the point, 1 second.
- 4 seconds loading time – Snail.
- 3-4 seconds loading time – Tortoise.
- 2-3 seconds loading time – Horse.
- 1-2 seconds loading time – Cheetah.
- >1 second – Peregrine Falcon.
Go on now and do your best to make your site load the fastest.
In this age of the internet, slow and steady does not win the race. Remember, the patient dog only eats the fattest bone because there is no meat left.
