There’s a maxim that goes thus: ‘queue kill sales’. People are generally impatient to get quality service just like you. We live in a jet world whereby the internet connect us all and minify our work. Of course every product we use is aimed at improving our life in some ways – that’s the hallmark of human existence.
In online world, everything counts. Slow loading website will kill your business; reduce your visitors and conversion rate. Google is number 1 website online today. Even if you have a bad network or internet service provider (ISP), they’ve make sure that their algorithm is simplified through penguin and hummingbird to give you your answer. To confirm, just type anything on Google and check the loading time.
You’ll see that the search engine result page will be less than one minute. If Google could consider site speed as one of the ranking factor, who are you not to do so.
Conversely to what matt cutt submitted in 2010 that site speed is just a minor ranking factor when compared to other ranking factor like link building, in-depth and usable content, authority, inbound marketing and so on. Speed is essential to website success. There are over 2 billion websites online today in different niches and industry. No matter the industry you belong to, there’ll always be competitors. To detect that, just type a relevant keyword related to an industry and Google will filter the top and most visited website out on their first page.
If you check them one after the other, you’ll realize that site speed is one of their ranking factor. The site will load quickly when clicked to redirect you to the page of such content on the site.
Seo moz also belief site speed is not a much consideration to Google search result pages. They said less than 1% of search queries are affected by site speed. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Remember the submission is almost 7 years when it was released. But this is 2017; don’t pour an old wine in a new wine skin. You need to always question every assumption to get the real fact.
We live in an extremely fast paced world because time is a convertible resource. Due to the bridge of digital that makes face to face selling unnecessary, human being continue to be more impatient on quality service of a site. The same buyer that will wait in a physical ecommerce store, he’ll even queue and shop around, putting everything needed in the cart, he’ll not wait online.
Buyers generally patronize you based on two genuine reasons, either to save time or save money. Visitors will much more buy a product if they know that it’ll save more time than the money charged for it. People buy for their reasons and not for yours. Therefore, you must position every point of your sales towards customer satisfaction. After all, it’s for them and not for yours.
Here’s an interesting discovery, desire to save money has a motivational power of 1.0 while fear of wasting time has a negative motivational power of 2.5. In other word, fear of time loss is two and half more powerful than desire to save money. Therefore everything counts.
Everybody’s favorite station is WII-FM – ‘what’s in it for me’, remember the rule of customer. Rule 1 says: customers are always right. Rule 2: if you are in doubt, refer back to rule one. Visitors has 3 choices; they can visit your site, visit your competitors site or visit no site at all. Your job is to position your site in such a way that your visitors will be convinced beyond any reasonable doubt to stay on your site for long. For this to happen, site speed is pivotal.
• Site that load faster will always win by a nose and have 1000% prize value in terms of traffic, conversion, PageRank and lower bounce rate.
• Site that loads faster has 2.5 positive power in the eye of visitors than its counterpart that load slowly.
• Site that takes too long to load lose 75% of customers to a competitors site to buy similar product.
• Strangeloop networks concluded that leading e-commerce sites out of best 2000 e-commerce website survey, takes only 4.9 seconds to load with easy navigation and reader friendly content.
• Whopping 75% of all internet users confess that they wouldn’t revisit a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load.
• Average smartphone users will visit another site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds of clicking.
• A satisfied customer tells 3 others about your site effectiveness while 1 unsatisfied customer tells 11 others to flee from such site.
With these reasons in mind, having a fast loading website is an integral part to survival today.
According to scientist, the human eye can quickly detect anything that appears within 100 milliseconds as being fast. They can also detect a delay when it takes 300 milliseconds. Therefore when a site takes less than 5 seconds to load, visitors are impatient.
No one can solve a problem they don’t know exist before and you cannot solve a problem if you are still in the same level you are when it’s first created. Awareness can be transformational.
You can advantage of neuster, Gtmetrix, yslow, to analyse your site speed to know how you fare online. Other tools include page speed, pingdom, etc. if you want to analyze your site with a close competitor’s site, just use whichloadfaster.info and get the result like the one below.
As a rule of thumb, website general weighs 130 kb including image sizes, dashboard and other cookies. Here are some tips to fix your site quickly.
Simplicity is the tall order of the day. Many website administrator with the hope of using plugins later, they’ll install a plugin to a site without using it for long. These can limit site speed drastically. Plugins is likened to applications on our smartphones. The more application you download in application store, the more likely your phone tend to hang and slow on the long run because it will intervene in the frequency of the random access memory (ram).
WordPress is the most used cms template in the world today because of their easy to install and user friendly plugins in which 60% of them are free to use. Based on this fact, website owners tend to take advantage of these without recourse to the long term effect on their site. Deleting unused or old plugins that’s not relevant again is a wise approach.
Image enhance our site visibility. Human being is relatively visual. The nerves that connect the brain with the eyes are 5 times than the nerves that connect the ear to the brain. That’s why they say images convert 5 times faster than the written word. That’s why you see many sites using images in form of charts, graphs, stock photos, screenshots, videos etc. but abuse is inevitable because graphic designers believe that image sizes is relatively bigger in size based on design. This explains why articles, words will continue to be smaller in kilobyte sizes compared to images even when converted to pdf, png, jpeg etc.
Google load faster due to lesser images on the site. Everything is words even their ads (screenshot) most are text link advert. In sharp contrast, I don’t mean to undermine the importance of images on a post but too much of it is unnecessary. Research findings by content chemistry report the same conversion on sites that use only 1 image and others that use 5 images.
You can only use more images provided you are a tech geek that knows how to compress the size of image without losing its quality. More importantly, high resolution, large sized images take ten times to load than normal images. This slows down the site loading speed substantially.
Step #2 – scale the compressed images properly for your website to prevent lags required to resize your images.
Nearly half of web users expect a site to load within 2 seconds. Choosing an outstanding hosting company ensures that loading time of your website is less than 2 seconds. Unfortunately, today there are pools of host that are mediocre and worse than hopeless. It’s not a bad thing to make mistake on Host Company when starting out but making the same mistake twice by staying with a poor host is stupidity in action. No matter how clever they are, if their service is not of high quality, it’ll spell a doom to your business in the nearest future, which in turn leads to loss of sales, revenues, and website visitors.
For crying loud sake, you are paying for the service. Your job is to make the most of your business website. If your site is hosted on an inefficient server, your Google page ranking will suffer.
 Your site continues to take too long to load – this can be as a result of the hosting company having insufficient bandwidth. One thing that differentiates top-notch hosting companies from mediocre one is their bandwidth. Many new host companies in their quest to get customer offer a lot of freebies and discounted prices for different users. Try to be more succinct and meticulous in your approach of selection. Your customers’ satisfaction is of inordinate importance.
 Loss of valuable data – the most disheartening occurrence of delaying action when it’s obvious to change a host company is the loss of valuable data. Even tiniest piece of data is valuable; to lose it is to lose business too. Ensure that your host company cares about your data and provides a top notch back up system because untimely repair makes rebuilding necessary.
Although no hosting company is perfect. They all have their drawbacks but if a hosting company gives you too much stress and your intuition tells you to change it, then don’t delay. Don’t assume they’ll change overtime. Remember the saying ‘people rarely change’, help them in realizing their fault by opting for a better hosting company. Don’t play tricks with your own mind. Hope is not a strategy. Action changes things.
These are top 3 factors that impede site speed. As simple as they are, they can contribute a great change to your site and increase your relevance and revenue by 60%. Just know that your site is your online presence, treat it very well. Take it seriously by making necessary changes to increase the site speed and outsmart your competitor. Afterall, if you don’t act now, your competitor will do and you’ll just wake up seeing them taking the front lead. Its winner takes all in online world. Therefore act now.
Author Bio: Adeshina Lawal is a successful freelance writer at successgist.com. He loves to guide his fellow writers with actionable tips to enhance their writing career. He’s also a content strategist and blogging expert that helps individuals and companies get result in lesser time. You can reach him on his twitter account.