Imagine this from an e-commerce entrepreneur’s point of view and you will know how inversely your sales are affected due to slow website speed.The internet age has brought with it probably the toughest test of patience – sit in front of a slow internet connection and you will know.
The other side of this problem is the website itself being slow to load. The images loading chunk by chunk can be such a discouragement to your visitors that they might never want to visit that website again.
Entire sales and revenue of an online store depend upon the number of visitors which are converted into buyers. Online customers show certain patterns in their behavior – like they want a website to load in 2 or less seconds. Failure in this basic criterion can lead to straying off the visitors and ultimately resulting in a huge loss of revenue.
Let us discuss these and other major drawbacks of slow website speed on visitors and sales.
1. Loss of users and revenues
* As discussed earlier, if website doesn’t load in 2 or less seconds, 50% of visitors abandon the website.
* 80% of these visitors never return to your website.
* An additional delay of even 1 second can lead to further loss of 16% visitors. A drop in visitors’ number influences the sales of the website negatively.
Key Findings : As per Google’s survey conducted in fourth quarter of 2013, delay of half a second causes 20% loss in revenue for a website.
2. Negative impact on search engine traffic
Google considers the loading time of a website for organic ranking of the website. Google prefers fast loading websites as they reduce operating costs and enrich user experience. It ultimately proves to be beneficiary to the e-commerce websites that have thousands of web pages.
Key Findings : Also, slow page loading directly affects the Google Adwords Quality Score.
3. Reduced conversion rate
Visitors have a tendency to add products to the cart and buy it later. It is important that your website loads efficiently when the visitor comes next time. This encourages him/her to complete the transaction and buy the products in the shopping cart. For e-commerce slow website speed doesn’t help in this process and distracts the potential customer.
Key Findings: Faster websites better the conversion rate of slow loading websites by 17%.
4. Lapse in payment process
Customers may choose the online payment option for a product they buy. This may result in a situation where the payment might be done from the customer’s side but the order not being placed actually. This is an embarrassing scenario where you will have to ask the customer to place the order again. The repeat in procedure also takes an unproductive toll on the website’s traffic.
Key Findings: The slow website speed upon checkout can cause the payment process to be halted midway.
5. Lagging behind in competition
In peak hours, if your website’s loading speed is slowed down it directly contributes in the profits of your competitor. Research shows that 64% of traffic is diverted from a website if it takes more time to load in peak hours .
Key Findings: The effect is that you end up lagging behind in competition gaining ill-reputation.
