Why a fast website matters for your small business

Date 7th February 2018 //
Author UENI

We’ve all experienced frustration when a website we want to visit takes a long time to load. But a sluggish website isn’t just annoying — for small business owners. In fact, not having a fast website can measurably hurt your earnings.

According to one study by the Aberdeen Group, a 1 second delay in loading time, on average, leads to:

Multiply that by however many seconds too long your webpage takes to load, and it becomes clear that your slow-loading webpage is turning off potential customers and, ultimately, costing you money.

Being fast online means more money in the bank

Most Internet users (79 percent) say they expect a website to load in 2 seconds or fewer— and will abandon (and not return to) a website that takes longer.

And the longer the delay, the steeper the drop in traffic. For example, according to Optimizely, when The Telegraph’s website was delayed by 4 seconds, its page views dropped by 11 percent; when this delay grew to 20 seconds, page views dropped off by nearly half, at 44 percent.

Since the average website takes more than 7 seconds to load, most websites aren’t meeting most customers’ expectations.

This fact has not been ignored by big companies. Amazon reported that for every millisecond (one-thousandth of a second) it sped up its site, revenue increased by a full 1 percent.

Moreover, Walmart found that for every single second its website speed improved, their conversion rate grew by 2 percent.

And when Trainline, a website to book train tickets, reduced lag time by 0.3 percent, that small improvement translated into an additional £8 million in annual revenue.

Google penalizes slow websites in search rankings

When you build a website for your business, you want Google to present it high among relevant searches.

But having a slow website may push your website further down in Google search results, as load time is one of many factors Google considers when ranking your webpage.

To check how fast any website loads, here’s a free tool from Google.

Can UENI provide me with a fast website?

Our strength at UENI is that we keep it simple — a virtue we’ll stick to here.

Here’s all you need to know: each UENI website presents simple content in a straighforward format, so it’s always optimsed for conversion and speed.

At UENI, we’ll build a fast website for your small businesses; we design them to load fast so yours will be quick enough to compete for a low monthly price.

Original blog can be found here