Say you’re visiting a website, any website at all, for the first time. Regardless of the content, what do you consider when deciding if the site is worth your time? Personally, if a website is taking too much time to load I’ll leave and go find another. The sites that are worth my time are the ones that load fast. If you aren’t persuaded by my personal opinion perhaps some statistics will sway you:
- 39% of consumers say speed is more important than functionality
- 47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less
- 40% will abandon a web page if it teaks more than three seconds to load
- 14% will start shopping at a different site if the page loads are slow and 23% will shop shopping altogether
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else next time
For online retailers a fast site in invaluable — it regularly means the difference between making a sale, and losing it. Poor site performance causes huge loses for online businesses and their revenue. Here are some examples:
- PayPal was down for 45 minutes in 2009 and lost millions of revenue
- Amazon loses 1% of their sales for each 100ms of latency
- Google loses 20% of search traffic ever 500ms of additional latency
A faster site results in happier visitors, more traffic and increased revenue for your business. Don’t believe me? Look at these numbers:
- Yahoo increased their traffic by 9% with a 400ms speed improvement
- Shopzilla reduced their load time from 7 seconds to 2. Traffic increased by 25% and revenue increased by 12%
Now, if that is just a sampling of what can happen when you focus on your site’s performance, why doesn’t everyone prioritize their site speed? One way of handling this issue is to go out and create a team that will focus on endlessly optimizing and re-optimizing the content on your site. Another option is to use a service like Torbit that automates the optimization process so you load fast. Torbit worries about making sure your site is running fast so you can focus on your business and generating revenue. Doesn’t that sound good? With faster speeds you get a faster website, improved Google ranking (they actually punish the page rank of sites that load slow), lower bandwidth costs, increased revenue, happier visitors, and more pageviews. Yes, a faster site can really cause that much awesome.