How To Use Loading Speed to Get More Traffic to Your Website Today
We all want our websites to get as many visitors as possible. It should come as no surprise - whether we use them to share ideas or as a retail platform, it is only natural that we want our websites to be popular.
Heck, we all know how search engine optimization is, and its entire purpose is getting traffic to our websites. The bottom line is, we all put a lot of time and effort into our websites and we want people to see that.
However, all the hullabaloo of creating quality content for their websites tends to make website owners neglect one important thing - website speed.
You can think of page load speed as your website's first impression. I'm sure we have all met a person who did something wrong the first time we met them. It was very difficult to like them afterwards, wasn't it? Therefore, loading speed to get more traffic to your website is so important today!
Website Speed and First Impressions
Well, what if a website leaves a bad first impression? You can imagine the scenario is very much the same.
We will further discuss what kind of first impression your website leaves and see if you can use this to your advantage.
It is no secret that page speed affects where a website lands on Google's lists of search results. In fact, research shows that pages with lower response times consistently score higher in search rankings.
What's more, the Hosting Tribunal points out that half of the visitors lose interest in a page that takes more than three seconds to fully load. Google records this as bouncing. Then they take it as lack of relevant content on the abandoned website. Furthermore, they give it an even lower score in subsequent searches for the same keyword. The higher your bounce rate the worse your score is!
So, if you want to boost your search engine ranking, you must keep your web pages reasonably swift to load. Needless to say, this is possibly the best way to get a steady flow of traffic to your website.
Effect on Visitors
We already noted that visitors tend to have little patience when a web page takes too long to load. The other statistics do not sound any better for website owners. 75% are likely to avoid a page that takes over 4 seconds to load. 39% will leave if only the images load too slowly. And finally, 44% will advise their friends against visiting those websites.
It only gets worse if you run an ecommerce website. Namely, each second of delay equals a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
What's more, 18% will give up on buying if the transaction takes too long, and 43% will go to a competitor's website if they do not get a positive customer experience.
The situation seems dire indeed. However, there is another way to look on this situation.
Remember that last statistic?
Now consider this - the average customer expects the webpage to load in three seconds, while the average web page takes 9.3 seconds to load.
Well, all things considered, if your competition all have slow websites and yours loads quickly, won't all those visitors flock to you?
We can also mention that low load times are important for site loyalty in more than half of the cases and 46% of people decide if they will buy at the same website twice based on checkout speed.
It is clear that keeping your load times low is the way to go both in order to secure new and recurring visitors to your website.
Some Success Stories
One of the ways to learn best is to follow the example of great companies and how they've improved by making their websites faster. After all, they have entire teams of web developers that make their websites better, and if they can benefit from better loading times, so can you.
Walmart is just one of the corporations that have seen the positive effects of speeding up their websites. They have recorded a 2% increase in conversions for each second of improvement to their website and a 1% increase in incremental revenue per 0.1 seconds.
AliExpress have taken this to a different level by reducing their loading times by 36%. As a result, they have been receiving 10.5% more orders and have had a 27% increase in new customers who decide to order a product via their service.
Still, this does not apply only to retail. Even a company as well-known as Yahoo! managed to get 9% more traffic by reducing their load times by just 0.4 seconds. This clearly shows us that any website can benefit from just a little optimization.
What We Can Do For Website Speed
Luckily, as technology progresses making websites faster is only becoming easier and easier. Using tools which help you compress your web pages and remove any unnecessary elements, thereby making them faster, is already becoming common practice among website creators.
This is not complicated at all, as many of the tools available have been designed with people who are not professional web programmers in mind.
But if you don't know where to start, you can take a look at this infographic. It will explain some techniques anyone can use to make their website faster. It shows how loading speed to get more traffic to your website works.
Have you tried to get your website speed faster recently? You can always check out your website speed with the Google page speed insights tool.
I'd love to know more in the comments below about your loading speed to get more traffic to your website today! Has website speed affected your website traffic?