Your Slow Site Is Quickly Losing Customers

Do you want to know some of the biggest annoyances for website users? A survey revealed the following turnoffs when it comes to user experience:

• Excessive pop-up ads
• Too much auto play content
• A site that is difficult to navigate and makes it hard to immediately find what the user is after
• A site that isn’t mobile-friendly. 70% of web traffic now comes from mobile phones so this is a BIG complaint.
• Stock photography. Users associate this with a company that lacks authenticity.
• Content that doesn’t relate to the keywords used by searchers.
• The web design is outdated, or too complicated.

That’s just a few of the more common complaints. But right at the top of the list is this one: slow loading speeds.

While people are doing more things online, they don’t want to spend too much time online. They want their user experience to be fast and efficient. They don’t want to wait and this is the case for pretty much everything in this society of instant gratification. In a recent market research survey, 47% of consumers said they expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. And, a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

When it comes to mobile internet users, 73% say that they have come across a website that was too slow to load.  51% of them say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error. 38% of mobile internet users claim to have encountered a website that wasn’t available.

You have just two to three seconds to keep most users interested in your website. Load speed has to be at its peak at all times and there are so many reasons why it lags. A few of the more regular faults include:

• Large volumes of unoptimized images are major culprits causing slow site loading. High-resolution images look nice but they consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. Uploading larger-sized images and scaling them down can unnecessarily increase the size of your web page which will cause your website to load slowly.
• An out of date server, or one that cannot handle a large amount of traffic at any one time
• Flash is an excellent tool for making your website interactive but it is highly likely to be behind your slow page load speed. Flash content is typically bulky, and the bigger the file, the slower things will load.
• Too much JavaScript, CSS, and image files lead to too many HTTP requests. When a user visits your web page, the browser will make several requests to load each of these files and this reduces the page load speed.
• By not caching properly, you’re slowing things down unnecessarily.Caching let’s you store frequently used data points in the ‘cached memory’. and subsequent requests for that same content gets served from the cached memory. This speeds up the data retrieval process, and page loading as well.

It’s time to grab a stopwatch and check your load speeds. It’s something you are probably not aware of. But you need to put yourself into your users shoes and look at your site through their eyes. You may have the best-looking site and  the most switched on digital marketing agency working for you. But these great things are wasted if your site visitors aren’t hanging around. So do a bit of website timing and if things are lagging, contact your site designer and domain host – and do it quickly.