Running a business is anything but easy, and your work only increases if you decide to build an online presence. Creating a website and maintaining it is a lot of work, especially if you are going to blog, too. However, having a website alone is not enough. You must be able to catch viewers’ attention the moment they land on your site and encourage them to engage with you.
To make a good first impression on viewers, you need, among other things, a fast-paced site. Online users are known for their impatience and have little time for sites that load slowly. If you think this is an overstatement, you’re in for a rude awakening. Slow page load time hurts your your page views and increases the bounce rate. The former tells you how many times your site was viewed in a certain period of time while the latter denotes the percentage of total visitors who abandon the page quickly.
Research done by Hostingtribunal shows that page views decline by 11% for every one second delay in page loading. Additionally, when the page load time increases from one second to five second, the bounce rate probability shots up by 90%. And it’s get worse. Slow sites can cause customers to even abandon their purchases and never come back. According to a survey, the main reason for leaving a purchase midway for 51% of online shoppers is none other than slow speed. Another report shows that 64% of shoppers who are unhappy with their shopping experience never return. The list doesn’t end here. Check this fact-packed infographic to learn about other negative effects of slow speed.
