How Website Performance Impacts Revenue

What Is Website Performance?

Website performance is a digital marketing term used to describe how fast a web page takes to load and display content. It comes under the umbrella of UX, aka User Experience, which is an understanding of your customers’ experience of interacting with your company. 

How does website performance affect my company?

Simply put, a website with poor performance will negatively impact the user experience. In fact, if your site takes over three seconds to load, 40% of users will immediately leave without clicking onto another page, known as bounce rate. Poor loading times deter the visitors that stick around too, with 79% of customers stating they wouldn’t return to a site with sluggish load times. Ultimately, a slow site is a negative reflection of your company, leading to:

• High bounce rate
• Loss of sales and enquiries
• Low customer satisfaction
• Users abandoning their shopping cart without checking out
• Lower ranking in search engine results 
• Damage to your brand’s reputation

When Google decides how to present search results to users, it takes the loading speed of websites into consideration. Fast sites are favoured and pushed to the top, becoming the first results users see. Slow sites are punished by being ranked lower, seriously reducing your website’s visibility to users. 

If your competitors’ websites are faster than yours, you’re losing traffic to them and missing out on the opportunity for conversion –  convincing visitors to take action to become a customer.

How do I know if my website is slow? How can I improve performance? 

Google’s own set of tools are popular for measuring performance. PageSpeed Insights can measure your load times, while Analytics monitors other statistics such as pages per visit, conversion rate, and bounce rate. The best-performing sites have a page loading speed of 2 to 3 seconds, so that’s the standard to aim for.

What’s causing my site’s slow performance?

There’s a multitude of reasons your load speed might be lagging behind the average rate. It could be your hosting plan. Your site host of choice may not be as appropriate for your site as it once was, particularly as both the web and your site are evolving over time. 

Or, maybe it’s your page weight. The more content (images, videos, documents, style sheets) a webpage has, the more bytes there are and the longer it takes to load the website on users devices. You can reduce your page weight by optimising its content. Check if your images are too large, not properly sized, or if there’s a better file type you can format them to.

Some other things you can do to de-bloat your site include using offsite video hosting and checking if you have any plugins that are causing unnecessary strain on your load times. 

Additionally, you might need to design your site to work on mobile. A site that’s clearly not been designed with mobile users in mind will cause sluggishness and high bounce rates. It’s a frustrating issue for visitors,  one that search engines consider particularly detrimental to their users, with Google now ranking mobile-friendly sites higher and showing them to users first. A poorly designed site affects you by dragging down your search engine ranking and again making it difficult for anyone to find you.

In Summary?

Websites aren’t easy. There’s so many things that can be the possible culprit for your slow load speed, and it can take time to identify just what the problem is. 

At Visionary Hub Space, we take all of this into consideration when we build your website. Our experienced team of web design specialists are passionate about delivering a product that satisfies you and your customers for the years to come.

We’ll complete every aspect of web design, from finding you the right host, increasing site visibility, designing a visually-perfect layout that works across all devices and drives traffic. Plus, our range of packages and care plans mean we can fulfill your expectations without breaking the bank. 

If you’re ready to have a website that can grow with you and your customers, contact us today.