We’ve all experienced frustration when a website we want to visit takes a long time to load. But a sluggish website isn’t just annoying — for small business owners. In fact, not having a fast website can measurably hurt your earnings.
According to one study by the Aberdeen Group, a 1-second delay in loading time, on average, leads to:
• 11% fewer page views
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversions
Multiply that by however many seconds too long your webpage takes to load, and it becomes clear that your slow-loading webpage is turning off potential customers and, ultimately, costing you money.
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Being fast online means more money in the bank
Most Internet users (79 percent) say they expect a website to load in 2 seconds or fewer— and will abandon (and not return to) a website that takes longer.
And the longer the delay, the steeper the drop in traffic. For example, according to Optimizely, when The Telegraph’s website was delayed by 4 seconds, its page views dropped by 11 percent; when this delay grew to 20 seconds, page views dropped off by nearly half, at 44 percent.
Since the average website takes more than 7 seconds to load, most websites aren’t meeting most customers’ expectations.
This fact has not been ignored by big companies. Amazon reported that for every millisecond (one-thousandth of a second) it sped up its site, revenue increased by a full 1 percent.
Moreover, Walmart found that for every single second its website speed improved, their conversion rate grew by 2 percent.
And when Trainline, a website to book train tickets, reduced their lag time by 0.3 percent, that small improvement translated into an additional £8 million in annual revenue.
Google penalizes slow websites in search rankings
When you build a website for your business, you want Google to present it high among relevant searches.
But having a slow website may push your website further down in Google search results, as load time is one of many factors Google considers when ranking your webpage.
To check how quickly any website loads, here’s a free tool from Google.
Can UENI provide me with a fast website?
To get a sense of how UENI-built small business websites stand up to the competition, here’s a comparison of professional websites for hairdressers using Google’s PageSpeed Insights:
At UENI, we host our websites on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the fastest and most secure service around. So you won’t have to worry about your website being slow or unsafe.
There’s a lot of high-falutin’ tech lingo that explains exactly what underlies the quickness of the websites we build, but our strength at UENI is that we keep it simple. Each UENI website is simple and straightforward, so it’s always good for conversion and speed.
At UENI, we build fast and secure websites for small businesses. We design them to load quickly, so yours will be quick enough to make your visitors visit and stay on your site.
