Would you like to meet again someone who didn’t make a good first impression on you?
Perhaps not.
Maybe you might tell your friends what you think about this person, too. That’s natural because we all want the best for our friends, and that includes keeping them away from unpleasing personalities if we can help it.
Guess what?
Your online viewers have the same tendencies. If they are not satisfied with their experience on your site, they will not only stay away from it but also send a red alert to their friends.
What are the things that make customer experience?
Killer content? Attractive website design? Amazing graphics? Super-easy navigation?
Well, all these things are important for a viewer, but there’s something that they value more than all of these—and that’s website speed (AKA web page loading time).
When you think of it, that’s hardly surprising. If a site loads painstakingly slowly, you, too, would want to close it rather than open other pages within that site, irrespective of how relevant its content is, great its design is, eye-catching its graphics are, and how simple its navigation is.
We look at these things only when a page loads fast enough for our liking, don’t we?
The comprehensive statistics assembled by the Hosting Tribunal confirm this behavior.
- A 1 second delay causes customer satisfaction to drop by 16%
- 75% of viewers don’t want to visit a page twice if its loading time is more than 4 seconds
- 39% of viewers will abandon a site if its images take too much time to load or don’t load at all
So, it’s clear as a day: slow loading time affects customer experience as well as site viewership.
Slow Site Affects More Than Customer Experience And Site Viewership
Slow site speed hits you hard where it hurts most—your revenues. According to a study, 64% of online shoppers don’t return to a site whose performance didn’t match their expectations.
If your site speed is slow, all these facts and figures can make for a depressing read. Or they can encourage you to make amends and turn the tide–it all depends how you take it. After all, if slow page loading time can cripple your business and give your brand a bad name, a fast site can help you gain and retain customers and win a competitive edge over your competitors.
As per one report, the average web page loading time is 9.3 seconds. Most likely many of your competitors, too, have a slow site and perhaps are completely unaware of it and its dire consequences–just like you were before reading this article.
With research showing that 43% of buyers will take their business to a competitor if their shopping experience is below par, there’s a strong chance that you can win their customers in huge numbers if you speed up your site.
So, what are you waiting for?
Get to work immediately and do whatever it takes to improve your site page load time. Your aim should be to achieve a loading time of 3 seconds or less, because anything above 3 seconds is too slow for most viewers.
How can you achieve that?
Well, start by checking this educative and fun-packed infographic which, among other things, show how big brands improved their page loading time and reaped its many benefits.
Why don’t you take a leaf out of their book instead of reinventing the wheel?
