How Website Speed Affects Your Business

Your website is an integral part of your business. You’re working on building a great design or revamping the one you already have. You’re building an outstanding content program to keep visitors coming back for more.

Have you thought about the speed of your website lately? If not, you’re like many other business owners. In this day and age, you may not realize the site’s loading speed is an important factor for your business operations.

How exactly does website speed affect your business? There are a few different ways it can impact you.

Fast Websites Offer Better Experiences

Imagine you’re browsing the web on your smartphone at an airport before you leave on a business trip. You need to make a quick purchase before take-off. You try to load the page and you wait. Then you wait some more.

Eventually, you give up on the page. It’s not going to load, and you’re not going to complete your purchase before you get off the ground.

This is a fairly poor customer experience. The same is true whether a visitor to your business website is trying to find information, make a purchase, or get in touch with you. If the site loads quickly, they’ll have a better experience and leave satisfied.

Slow websites, on the other hand, are frustrating. They may even cause customers to give up. They’ll look elsewhere for information or they’ll buy from your competitors.

A Slow Website Hurts Leads and Sales

As you can see from the example above, a slow website could be hurting both your lead generation efforts and your sales.

If people can’t load a video, they won’t watch it. They also won’t spend time filling out a form to get more information about the product. If the purchase process is slow, they won’t buy from you.

Website Speed Impacts SEO

How much have you invested in search engine optimization (SEO) lately? If you’re like most business owners, SEO is one of your top priorities for your website.

Did you know website speed impacts your search engine results page (SERP) ranking? It’s true. Since fast websites provide better user experiences, Google and other search engines give them higher marks than slow-loading pages.

If you want to give your SERP a boost, speed up your website.

Better SEO makes your website more visible to the people who are trying to find you. If your website is slow, it could be hurting your company’s visibility.

How Do You Know Whether Your Site Is Slow?

Once you understand the potential impacts of a slow website on your business, you’ll likely want to know your site’s speed. How can you find out what your website speed is?

There are many online tools to help you determine website speed. Even Google offers some free resources to help you check your speed and then improve it.

What Can You Do If Your Site Is Slow?

Now you’ve checked your website speed, and you’re concerned it’s not loading fast enough for your visitors. What can you do to speed things up?

There are a few different tactics you can use. First, take a look at the backend of your site. Are you running any hefty or unnecessary plugins? Turn off non-essential features. You might even consider a redesign of your site.

Next, make sure you’re optimizing videos and images for the web. Optimized images and videos will load faster.

You might also want to consider your web host. If you’re not using dedicated hosting, making a switch could be one of the ways to speed up your website experience.

Improving your website speed is often simple, but it’s an important step. If you want to improve your SEO, enhance your lead generating activities, and improve your business, take some steps to speed up your website today.