How Site Speed Drives Sales

A review carried out by the BBC on their website — a site that receives hundreds of millions of visits every month — found that just a 1-second increase in site loading time reduced the number of visitors they received by 10%. A larger study by Pingdom found that even with the most engaging content, nearly half of all potential customers abandoned a page after waiting only 6 seconds!

The surprising answer for most businesses is yes — because these businesses are already losing that traffic. Businesses don’t realize they are losing this traffic because they’ve never achieved a truly quick website   and the benefits that they bring. As a result, many companies continue to waste advertising budget driving users to landing pages when those dollars are much more efficiently spent on re-capturing the users who are already there.

The real question is, how much better could you be doing if you had a faster website?

As it turns out, quite a lot better.

When Pinterest rebuilt their site to reduce wait time by 40%, they experienced an increase in traffic from search engines and a 15% bump in conversion rate for signups. When furniture store Zitmaxx reduced their load time to 3 seconds, they saw their conversion rate jump by an incredible 50.2%.

How much would these improvements be worth to your business?

Most businesses treat a slow-running business as a technical problem that is addressed either by the infrastructure teams or (hope) by the Content Delivery Network. That can bring some improvements if the website is extremely slow, but it’s not ideal.

A slow website isn’t just a technical problem — it’s a business problem with a technical solution. It’s something to be invested in that produces real, measurable results to the bottom line. For that reason, we also like to think of it as a business opportunity.

Businesses that invest in their site speed are more likely to rank well (we know that because Google says so), have a reduced bounce rate, and deliver a better first impression. We naturally associate speed with efficiency, performance, and quality; a slow site has the opposite associations.