The marketplace has never been more competitive than it is in the digital age. In the days when brick-and-mortar businesses, such as high street stores, were the main way people bought products, customers did not have a lot of choice. If there was something a customer needed urgently, they would have to visit the nearest store stocking the item. They could not always afford to be picky about which offered the best products or the finest service. However, this is no longer the case in the era of online shopping. If a customer is not satisfied with your website, they can (and will) almost always leave and visit another instead. After all, it takes mere seconds to find a competitor nowadays.
There are many reasons why a visitor may not be satisfied by your website – if it is difficult to navigate, does not respond to their device or has an unattractive design, for example. However, the most common reason a visitor will leave a website and go to a competitor’s instead is load time. With the near-endless amount of choice online, no customer wants to be left waiting for a website to load. They don’t want to wait one minute, they don’t want to wait thirty second; in fact, almost 50% of website users will leave a domain if it hasn’t loaded within just four seconds. This is how important it is to have a website that loads quickly.
Is your website loading fast enough? The easiest way to check is to run it through a page speed tool. Pingdom have a useful resource for this, allowing you to see how quickly your page loads from different cities around the globe. You can see if your website is crossing the four-second mark everywhere from Stockholm to New York City. If it is, you could be limiting your website traffic and therefore reducing the potential sales your business is making.
A website’s load time is not, unfortunately, the easiest thing to fix. You may require the expertise of a team fluent in website design in order to solve the problem. After all, the best ways to guarantee that your site runs quickly are to do things like enable compression and reduce the bandwidth on pages, minify resources like HTML and CSS, or restructure the code on your website to ensure important things are loading above the fold.
Ironically, improving your website’s load time is something that takes some time. However, it is one of the most important things a business-owner with a slow-running website can do to increase traffic, amplify conversions and ultimately drive more sales. In a competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to have a website that isn’t fast.