The Major Impact of Website Speed
[guest post by Matt Banner]
One of the most crippling issues a website or online business can face is a long and drawn out loading speed.
Even a fraction of a second can cost your website traffic and conversions, so it’s important to understand how various factors affect your site’s speed and performance.
That’s why today I’m going to offer some insight into just how important your site’s speed is in the grand scheme of things. I’m also going to show you a sleek infographic I made that will give you additional knowledge and tips to increase your site’s speed.
The Importance of Website Loading Speed
From a sheer ecommerce standpoint, page load times have huge impacts on conversions and ultimately revenue. Take a look at these shocking statistics:
- A one second delay in loading speed costs Amazon $1.6 billion in sales!
- Furthermore, Walmart performed a study that showed every second of improvement in website loading time resulted in a 2% increase in conversions!
- Website loading times influence your SEO and therefore your traffic numbers. Slower sites tend to rank lower than faster ones.
Numerous SEO metrics are affected by your website loading speed including, but not limited to: bounce rate, organic traffic, SERP ranking, user experience, and many others. While you may feel like there’s little to nothing that can be done about page speed, there’s actually plenty of things you can do to increase your website’s loading speed.
There’s overwhelming information that supports the importance of page loading speed, but how can you possibly affect something so abstract? It can be as simple as using a caching plugin, or switching from flash to HTML 5. For other sites, a more widespread change could be in order.
Take a look at this infographic for more statistics, knowledge, and tools to speed up your website!
