08 Dec Website loading speed: How does it affect your sales?
It’s been many years since Google announced that website loading speed and web hosting plays a role in SEO. How many take this into account? How many website owners know that according to a recent study, 40% of visitors leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to open?
These are some of the points that we will cover in this article, which aims to give you a clear picture of the critical importance of loading speed on a web page.
A quick website makes visitors happy. It may seem a bit far-fetched but the reality is that no one wants to wait for no reason. If your website is slow to provide information to the visitor, the visitor will go to find it elsewhere.
How long would you leave a customer waiting at the entrance of your store without even welcoming them? Would he make a big impression on you if he left? If he did not come to your store again? What would you lose in the long run from this lost customer?
In the case of websites, the visitor does not care if the server is overloaded or if the code is misspelled. He wants the information for which he came and he wants it immediately.
How website loading speed affects your sales
Sales are not only made by eshop. All professional websites are created with the aim of gaining new customers. I find it extremely unlikely that an entrepreneur will make a serious investment in building a website without a sales goal.
But let’s take for example an eshop that currently has a daily turnover of € 100 and its home page loads in 8 seconds.
We use this as an example as, usually, the home pages of eshop are quite loaded with content and unfortunately (for the owners) they are slow.
All of the above translate into customers who spend more time in the Eshop searching, exploring, comparing and ultimately shopping.
Thus, with a completely conservative – down-to-earth – realistic forecast, we can expect an increase in sales of + 10% per day. This means + 10 € per day. So + 300 € per month or + 3,600 € per year. This is money that your business does not actually receive due to the loading speed of the website.
Amazon, perhaps the largest market place in the world along with eBay, takes website loading speed very seriously. According to research, every extra second of waiting for a visitor costs Amazon $ 1.6 billion in sales a year.
How web page loading speeds affect your Google ads
Better ads on Google automatically translate into more sales. This is to be expected. The more people who come to your store, the more likely you are to make sales.
But since we pay Google to promote us (and in many cases grossly), why does web page loading speed matter?
Google wants to keep its visitors happy. When we create ads, Google rates them with a quality score of 1 out of 10, which also takes into account the loading speed of the web page. The faster the website, the higher the quality score.
A low quality score translates into fewer ad impressions, more expensive clicks, lower ranking results than your competitors.
So a slow website makes you lose money even on Google which, perhaps, you had the impression that once you pay, nothing else plays a role.
Google has, so to speak, an obsession with web page loading speed and not unjustly so. As she states: No matter what, faster is better and less is more.
This is not limited to paid results (Google Ads). A slow website has a worse ranking in organic as we mentioned at the beginning of the article.
How to measure web page loading speed by yourself
One of the industry standard services for measuring web page loading speed is gtmetrix.
The servers that do the tests are basically in Canada and, in our opinion, if your website “gets a good grade” on such a remote server, it will definitely do even better in Europe.
In gtmetrix enter the address of your website and after a short wait you will find a report that looks like the one below.
The goal should be for your website to get at least B in both tests. Keep in mind that these scores may have discrepancies between different measurements (if you measure it today and measure it tomorrow as well), of the order of +/- 4 to 6% which are basically due to the load of your given server moment of measurement.
In addition to the score, gtmetrix gives you a complete report of the points where you are doing well and the points where you need improvement. Other websites where you can measure the loading speed of a website are tools.pingdom.com and www.webpagetest.org.
If you’re really interested in increasing sales in your eshop, then you should definitely put website loading speed at the top of your agenda. Remember, better website speed means better sales.
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