No matter how much time, money, and creativity you’ve invested in your digital marketing plan, a good website is essential if the plan is to work as well as you hope. That’s easy to say, of course, but what exactly does ‘a good website’ mean?
Presuming your digital marketing plan is designed to make sales, the quality of a website can only be judged on how well it converts.
While many digital marketing plans rightly place great weight on highly visible activities such as social media campaigns, SEO, and content marketing, it’s actually the unseen website optimizations that can make all the difference.
One such consideration is the speed of your website. Slow websites are costing businesses sales and profit every day without them realizing it. If you’ve never considered whether your own website could be optimized to run quicker, this includes you.
In short, the speed of your website is undermining the success of your whole digital marketing plan. Here’s why.
Website speed statistics
A number of huge names in the world of online business have done their own research to shed more light on the issue of how website speed may affect your conversions.
Walmart claims that a speed improvement of just 100 milliseconds, or 0.1 of a second, increases their revenue by 1%. Similarly, Amazon has reported a 7% drop in conversions for every second delay.
Akamai, one of the world’s largest content delivery platforms, also found that 47% of people expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, 40% will give up if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 52% of online shoppers consider fast web page loading important in their loyalty to a particular site.
With these figures being provided by such big players, you can see how important website speed is to the success of your digital marketing plan.
Website speed for SEO
For any website to play its part in a successful digital marketing plan, it needs to be found by people looking for the products or services it’s providing. This means having good SEO; both on-page and off.
While keywords and links are of course necessary for this, the loading speed of a website is also a factor. Google will never give away the exact formula for how its rankings are decided, but they do give us enough to be able to rank well.
To this end, the search engine giant has stated that site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithms. It makes sense, as Google loves to send its users to websites they’ll like, and fast loading ones are always received better than slow ones.
As well as helping your website to rank better in real time results, faster loading can also help it to be better crawled by Google’s robots, helping it to be better indexed in their database.
Website speed for user experience
Speeding up your website to improve your SEO is important, but how your visitors behave on your site once they arrive is perhaps a bigger factor in the success of your digital marketing plan.
Poor user experience is guaranteed to increase bounce rates, or the percentage of people immediately leaving your website without taking any action.
With so many websites out there and so many companies vying for your customers’ attention, it’s crucial you keep them on your site once you’ve managed to get them there.
Undoing the hard work you put into your digital marketing plan with high bounce rates means a lot of wasted effort and a lot of money being left on the table.
Whether by adversely affecting your SEO or by harming the user experience, a slow loading website will always mean fewer page views. In turn, fewer page views will mean fewer conversions.
Don’t undermine the hard work you’ve put into your digital marketing plan. Contact SeeThrough Web today to see how we can help you to speed up your website for success.
Do you want to find out how to speed up your website? Here is the infographic that will help you do so.
https://seethroughweb.com/wp-content/uploads/speed-up-website-infographic.jpgSpeed up Your Website – Infographic was created by FirstSiteGuide using info from their in-depth guide on how to speed up your website.