While building a website, you must measure every minute detail that could affect the incoming site traffic and performance, as its importance is crucial. You need to offer a better user experience compared to your competitors online. This will establish an impressive online presence for your business. Also, ensure that users spend more time on your website. Thus, more time spent on a website raises the likelihood of more conversions!
Confused about how you can do this? Let’s break it down into more specific details.
Let’s say you have your products/services ready. You have everything sorted out, right from SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) to shipping partners, etc. to run your business like a well-oiled machine.
Now, it’s your website’s turn to go live and leverage its power, bringing quality leads and converting those into customers. Remember, a website with a great user experience helps businesses increase conversion rates and earn a robust ROI.
Website performance and its importance & impact on your business – the intricacies demystified!
Since 2017, rising mobile-first indexing and emphasis on digital marketing have doubled the average web page in size. Whereas the network connections have mostly remained constant.
However, the asymmetrical relation between the web page size and the network speed has caused complex website performance matters. The average time for a web page to load on a mobile device is generally 10 – 15 seconds.
Now, onto the article. Let’s look at the 7 reasons why the importance of your website performance is crucial for your business’s success.
SEO for Better Rankings
A poor-performing website affects businesses heavily in terms of decreased SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages). Many websites are entirely disappearing from the organic search results as they are not able to hit the bar set by Google page speed.
Therefore, it directly proves that slow-loading websites directly impact search engine rankings – making or breaking a brand or business on Google and other major search engines. An improved site speed gets conveyed on social media platforms,improving brand awareness, and pushing the business at full throttle on SERPs.
It will gain maximum visibility and bring benefits in terms of conversions and continuous brand growth. All because of an SEO-friendly and SEO-optimized website!
Sales to an All-New High
A webpage performance can be checked on Google’s Page Speed Insights, Pingdom Test, UpTrends, GTMetrix, etc. A good-performing website promises a better user experience than other poor-performing websites in your domain.
Google found out that even half a second delay in page load times caused a massive slump in product sales. This made them create prototype tools to test page load time and speed. They did this to ensure that website performance never affects sales.
A better user experience reduces the phenomena of cart abandonment and high bounce rates. This automatically transforms into more conversions and an increased ROI for your business. According to a survey by Bluecore and Forrester, more than 88% of online retailers go with high-performance, user-friendly website experiences.
Many customers share their shopping experiences with the rest of the world through social media platforms. Thus, it is evident that under-performing websites don’t get customer revisits, highlighting the importance of speed for website performance. In contrast, those with long-lasting positive impressions encounter a windfall in sales!
Grow Conversion Rates
The cyber-world of today is quite different with powerful advertising campaigns that might drive high conversion rates for brands. If you want the same for your brand’s digital presence and to improve conversion rates, pick the winning formula of performance, responsiveness, and user experience!
A study by Aberdeen expressed a critical fact. Every second that a website became slower beyond the two-second mark, it lost nearly a 7% drop in conversion and an 11% drop in page views.
eCommerce websites suffer more than millions per day with such a huge customer drop rate. Page views for a news aggregator or content site make a significant dent in its monthly ad revenue. Thus, always be mindful to pick the winning combo if you want your drop-in conversions to vanish forever!
The importance of a robust SEO and advertisement campaign on social media platforms can’t be undermined as it will go sky-high and impact website performance & conversion rates. But if you want to ensure website performance to positively affect your conversion rates, you can use many testing tools available.
An Evident Brand Awareness
When a user navigates to a business’s website and then gets back to the SERP, the phenomenon is known as pogo-sticking. From irrelevant content and unnecessary pop-ups to slow-loading websites, these are the most common traits of pogo-sticking. As soon as the users start hitting the back button, the search engine guesses that the content isn’t relevant or hard to find, and your site rankings keep on sinking into the abyss.
But according to Backlinko, if you apply the killer combo of page speed and relevant content, your site will experience better SEO and improved site rankings. In this way, your website performance grows exponentially, and so does your brand awareness, which is of utmost importance.
More Usability
Several metrics define the relationship between customer acquisition, retention, and website usability. KPIs like page speed insights, page load time, and responsive design have subsets like site trust, information relevance, and interactivity.
All these create a cumulative impact known as usability. It is correlated with navigability, user experience, reachability, etc. Search engine bots and web crawlers implement methods to determine usability.
The entire effect is mutually dependent creating a benchmark for website usability for your business. These components will also add to more significant customer loyalty towards your business.
Increased User Engagement
User engagement statistics are responsible for website analytics. It enables the admins and authorities of a business to tweak and make new strategies for online sales. With the right tools to analyze, predict, and implement businesses can make the best decisions for website performance and conversions. They can execute enhanced user engagement for fast-loading and responsive websites.
A high-performing websites use the following user engagement parameters: User Feelings, User Psychology, and User Interactions. It enables us to forge a better emotional, behavioral, and cognitive connection with humans and machines. In this way, online businesses create a strong bond of trust, attention, and motivation. This will help convert customers into repeat customers, brand ambassadors, and quality leads – loyal to the brand forever!
Impact on OpEx (Operating Expenditure) and Revenue
If your business invests in website performance, it will reap massive success (just be patient). Investing in website performance optimization amplifies Capital Expenditure (CapEx) by minimizing operational costs and hardware expenses. Hence, the business revenue increases.
For example, eCommerce giant Shopzilla implemented performance enhancements by reducing page load time from 7 seconds to 2 seconds. This resulted in a 50% operational budget cut-down, utilizing the same hardware equipment for processing user requests. This led to enhanced website responsiveness and increased agility of the hardware resources. Turning up the revenue by 12%, the company could now accommodate more user requests.
Performance of a Website
- The time taken to deliver the requested material – content and/or media and accompanying HTML content to the requesting web browser.
- Browser response to the page load requests.
- When the requested web page renders on the browser, the end-users determine the ultimate empirical measure of the page load speed – poor, acceptable, or fantastic!
A significantly low website page load speed isn’t necessarily an indicator of a poor-quality business. In fact, your business operations could run quite smoothly. If your website performance doesn’t reflect that smoothness, a prospect or visitor could be frustrated.
To them, a lagging page of a website often gives them the impression that the business quality is as poor as the website’s performance. Because today, your website is the face of your business in today’s digital era!
A not-so-user-friendly interface can impact conversion and digital impressions as users expect a certain degree of responsiveness when browsing websites. Your business could suffer directly even when your page load time is less by a couple of milliseconds! And it could well be a possibility that the user will never visit that website again.
Your target audience visits your website and gets stuck while the website is trying to load. We all have been there, right? Slow-loading websites are one of the worst online experiences users can have. Poor website performance is evident when page loading times out.
But, how page load time affects conversions and good user experience?
For example, BBC loses an additional 10% of its consumers for every extra 1 second it takes to load, whereas the same 1-second delay in page load time for Amazon results in US 1.6 billion of their annual sales loss!
On the contrary, when Mozilla increased its page speed by 2.2 seconds, it translated into 15.4% of download figures, roughly 10 million per year! While Yahoo gained an additional 9% of consumers by simply reducing its page load time by 0.4 seconds. Walmart witnessed a 2% increased conversion rate for page load speed optimization every second.
The experience becomes worse when there are error messages on pages that are important for downloading some information. Improper redirects leading to particular pages that don’t work are some of the worst woes of navigating a website.
I will conclude this section with a very insightful comment:
“Web pages don’t have loading bars. So when the page is slow, the visitor doesn’t know if the delay will be another 500 milliseconds or 15 seconds. Maybe it will never load. And the back button is right there!”
Andy Crestodina, Orbit Media
User Experience of a Website
Certain websites have flashy themes but don’t seem to load even after ages. If permalinks are not SEO-optimized, or if no XML sitemap is present on the website, it furthers adds to a bad user experience. You can form a compilation of the worst CX/UX/UI of internet history by combining all of the above. For a better understanding of the UX & UI of a website, you can read: How UX & UI work in WordPress.
We often come across situations where a slow website speed is only device-specific. Maybe, the website we are visiting offers a good user experience while navigating using a desktop or PC. But the website performance increases drastically when we try to reach a website using a mobile device – a smartphone or a tablet.
The absence of mobile-friendliness of a website is one of the biggest mistakes that you could make while building your website.
Fact check: Google says 70% of Sites Have Been Moved to Mobile-First Indexing. This goes on to talk about the immense focus on mobile-first indexing for websites.
The final touchdown
To ensure better website performance and its impact to be positive, you also need to litmus test your website against the market competitors. For this, a simple, Just-Noticeable Difference derived from the Weber-Fechner Law is essential.
Your site outperforms its competitors by a mere 20% in terms of search engine rankings, website speed SEO, page load time, page load speed, and good user experience. When all your site attributes are faster, your business is deemed superior by your people and your competitors in the industry.