Is your website fast enough? Not many of you would answer with a definite “yes.” However website owners tend to regard poor loading speed as a mere inconvenience. In the meantime, money is slipping away from them with every second. This is due to the impact that website speed makes on SEO, customer satisfaction, mobile-friendliness, and much more. Let’s find these financial leaks — see how slow website speed costs you money.
In what ways slow website speed costs you money
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Lost customers, purchases, or orders
When it comes to page loading speed, users’ average patience limit is about 3 seconds. After that, they leave — however, they could have become your customers.
They have not finished, or have not even started, their acquaintance with your offers and benefits. They could not place an order for your services, buy things from your store, or even get your contacts for further communication. Or they could, but their requests were not processed by your “turtle” website.
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Mobile customers cut off
According to Statista, in 2018, the share of website traffic generated on mobile phones reached 52.2%. Compared to 0.7% in 2009, this reveals an impressive trend.
When it comes to e-commerce, US mobile retail sales share reached 39.6% in 2018 and is headed for 53.2% in 2021. Make sure you are not missing out on this big piece of the tasty pie.
Compared to desktop users, mobile users more often have a poor internet connection or weak devices. In addition, they are often pressed for time and are easily distracted. Slow website speed can cost all of these customers.
Responsive web design or a mobile site version are a must today — they do not only provide great page display on all devices, but also make your pages lighter for mobile. However, you may have plenty of other speed issues that make your mobile users leave too soon.
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Search results never found
All other things being equal, low speed websites are losing in search rankings to their competitors. This is because Google considers website speed in search ranking algorithms.
Often even one or two positions in search results, not to mention search pages, decide who will get the “winning click” from a potential customer — you or your competitor. Another sad scenario is that they simply could never find you at all.
When you are not satisfied with organic SEO results, you may want to refer to paid advertising more often than you otherwise would. And even paid advertising costs you more — see below for more details.
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More expensive promotion
For additional promotion purposes, many websites use paid advertising on services like Google AdWords. This allows them to display ads above, below, or to the right of the organic search results in Google.
How much you pay per click is determined in a special automatic auction. You just specify your maximum bids for every search word. Participants with a higher bid have privileges in the display, while many others never make it to the first page.
An important point is that Google regards your ad quality as a ranking factor — including the level of their relevance and usefulness for readers.
So if people click on your ads, come to your website, and then leave it because of low speed, you will have tougher competition in the ad auction.
In other words, you will have to place higher bids in order to get through. Extra expenses for nothing — that’s how slow website speed costs you money.
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Reputation losses for your business
Word-of-mouth marketing works, and works effectively. But its effect can be different. Happy customers tell others about successful experiences with your company and your website. No successful experiences means lost chances for referrals.
In addition, it is a strong trend today that users complain publicly online about a website’s poor work or faults. You certainly don’t want to appear in posts like that!
So improve your website speed now!
You see what slow website speed costs you — so it’s time to mend all these financial leaks, and let your business ship sail to new gains. Luckily, this can be done with just a good speed optimization.
Contact our website support team — we will do performance audit for your website and fix all speed issues! Do not let any more seconds eat your budget up ;)
