Your Slow Website is Costing You Money
When it comes to digital marketing, the website you're directing people to is one of the most important parts of marketing, next to the product you're selling. It's your online brochure that's sole purpose is to give the best first impression possible. If your website is taking longer to load than your prospects patience, you're losing that prospect and the investment you put into getting that prospect.
The Statistics
Google states that people bounce off a website if it doesn't load within 3 seconds, so if your site is taking longer than that, you better bet that majority of your traffic is bouncing before you can attempt to give that first impression.
In a 2012 analysis Walmart found that when load times go from 1 second to 4 seconds, conversion rates decline sharply. According to Walmart, they noticed for every 1-second improvement in page load time, they saw a 2% conversion increase.
Negative Impact
No matter how awesome your digital ads look, how much you entice the prospect, statistics show that you'll waste your ad budget and severely lower your profit margin if you don't fix it. I've seen this firsthand; I was marketing for a website that took between 15 and 45 seconds to load. Yes! Almost a minute to load. Once I got through to the developer on what needed to change, analytics showed a significant increase in conversions.
Not only will people leave if your website loads slow, but Google will also punish you too. Think about it, their ultimate goal as a search engine is to make their users happy by not only putting the most relevant searches in-front of their users but the most optimized. Having a slow website will profoundly impact your organic SEO score. For example: If your competitor's website is faster than your website, Google will bump them higher in the organic results than your site, even if you're selling a better product. It's also known that all your pay per click campaigns will get a lower score, thus costing you a higher cost per click.
Test your site
You'd think all web developers understand this concept, but surprisingly, the majority of the developers I've encountered have no clue how important the website speed is, so don't assume that your site is up to par. As a business owner, CEO, and especially if you're a digital marketer, you should routinely test your website so that you can nip this money pit asap. When I've shopped around for developers, this was the first thing I did; if they had a slow website, I couldn't trust them to maintain our corporate site. Here is a free tool you can use: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Test your site. You typically don't want to be below a score of 85, but ideally, you want to be over 93 with a load speed under three seconds.
How you fix it
So enough of the negative talk lets get constructive and fix this. If your site received a low score, it's ok, most do. If you have a web developer that you work with, refer them to the test results, they should be able to fix it from there in no time. If they can't, this may be the time to find a new one.
The following are some easy steps and resources to help you if you manage your website:
1. Optimize your images: This is the most common mistake that developers make, they don't optimize the images. It's also the easiest to fix. One of the free tools I like to use is www.tinypng.com. This site will take your pictures and compress them to a fraction of what they used to be, thus making them load faster. There are also free plugins that will automatically do this with all your websites pictures. If you're using Wordpress (I hope you are), refer to the following plugins:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/resmushit-image-optimizer/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
2. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content:
Great tutorial: https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-fix-eliminate-render-blocking-javascript-and-css-in-above-the-fold-content-on-wordpress#gref
3. Plugins: Limit the number of plugins you use. Too many plugins can also slow down your website. Most importantly, delete plugins that your site doesn't use.
4. Caching: Another easy and effective way to speed up a website. In a nutshell, by caching, it limits your website's database from retrieving files every time a request is made, by storing static image and HTML files it allows visitors to see your site faster. You can use the following plugins to accomplish this: