There are many elements affecting a customer’s choice to make a purchase and even more so to purchase your website. Naturally, you cannot influence their finances and their wishes but you can make sure that once they visit your website, all the elements seem tailored seamlessly to enhance their customer experience. However, even the most attractive of website designs and the most affordable offers won’t even be seen if your website is painfully slow to load. If you have doubts about the importance of website load speed, here are a few reasons to convince you to take it into serious consideration.
First impressions matter
Think of your website as a physical brick-and-mortar store and imagine the clerk being extremely slow, not because they have to but because they don’t feel like working. And now imagine your frustration as a customer for being treated like that. Chances are that you would consider the clerk very unprofessional and that opinion would reflect on your opinion of the brand. This is the same as your website because if users manage to get to the information they are looking for quickly, then they would perceive your website and consequently your brand as reliable and trustworthy. A slow load speed would produce just the opposite effect and chances are, you won’t get another opportunity to improve this negative first impression.
Expectations, expectations
Modern customers have busy working schedules and are constantly bombarded with different data which means they are in dire need of concrete information fast. They might have to put up with slow co-workers who disrespect deadlines or with an endless line at the bank but with your webpage, they have a choice and you can be sure they will exercise their right to close a slow-loading page. If you don’t live up to their expectations of website loading speed, the website will experience a high bounce rate, which is a sign that you need to improve the speed and possibly other website elements to increase sales. You should set your goal to two seconds and with those two seconds, you will buy yourself time to convince them that your products are the best choice.
Conversion and speed rates
If your users have by some miracle persevered through the slow-loading page and set their minds on a product, the slowness will be even more irritating when they try to purchase it through the online store section. However, this is not only a question of preference but functionality and some of the things you can expect are abandoned carts, double orders, and users being double charged. This is why it is vital that the digital agency you hire can tend to your e-commerce strategy properly. Your reliable Shopify experts need to know the platform inside and out and be experienced enough to answer any questions you might have. Since you would want them to design and build a custom solution for you, you need to collaborate closely to reach the most optimal solution.
Google rankings love speed
Although Google values content more than speed, slow loading speeds can affect your Google ranking. If you are aware that even you, as an average user, won’t go past the first few results on the first search page, let alone the second page, you can begin to imagine how crucial the ranking position is. The reason for this lack of patience can perhaps be found in our fast-paced lifestyles and the multitude of obligations and content we are exposed to every day. Be that as it may, slow pages give rise to a bad user experience so if your loading speed has become slower than the notorious 2 seconds, that will affect your rank on the search engine result page.
Speed across different devices
Business owners have just recently started taking mobile internet browsing into consideration and they can be somewhat slow when it comes to the responsiveness of their webpage. Everyday common experience shows that a lot of users shop while on the move via their mobile phones, so the e-commerce platform, as well as the rest of your website, need to work across different devices. The user might give a website more time to load when they are on their smartphones as opposed to when they are on their computers just because they are used to things being a bit slow but that doesn’t mean that those 2 seconds can turn into half a minute. A reasonable loading time via their phones is something that will significantly increase their user experience.
Conclusion
One of the biggest benefits of this fast-paced digital era is that you can find it almost impossible on the internet. It provides a customer with a way to find a customized item or a rare edition of a book, while entrepreneurs have an opportunity to offer their products on a global scale. For a small business owner, this also means plenty of competition so you need to always be at the top of your game to stay in it. This is why website loading speed matters—customers will simply disregard your website considering the amount of choice they have online. So, improving your website speed will do wonders for increasing your sales.
