Why Your Slow Website is Losing You Customers

When it comes to doing business online, speed matters. Customers expect things to be done fast – from next day delivery to instant customer support, people don’t want to hang around.

Remarkably, this desire for speed even extends as far as your website. Think about it – how many times have you clicked on a Google search result that seemed relevant, got fed up of waiting for the site in question to load, hit your browser’s back button and visited a different site instead?

Now imagine it’s your business website that’s slow to load. Those people hitting the back button because they’re fed up of waiting? They’re potential customers.

Why speed matters

It’s all well and good using anecdotes to illustrate a point, but let’s have a look at some hard statistics instead.

How long do you think a visitor will wait for your website to load? 10 seconds? 5 seconds? It’s even less than that. Research by Kissmetrics shows 47% of people expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of people give up on a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Even a small delay can have a significant impact on your business’s bottom line – the same study found that just a one second delay in loading can lead to a 7% decrease in conversions.

To make things even worse, a slow site may make it harder for people to find your online business in the first place.

Getting up to speed

Worried your site might not load quickly enough? Well, if it’s noticeably slow to load then you almost certainly have a major issue with site speed.

You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see your site’s speed score. Marks are out of 100 and anything over 90 is ideal, while a score under 80 indicates you have speed issues that need to be addressed.

Helpfully, the PageSpeed Insights tool also tells you what you need to fix in order to speed up your site.

But the chances are you won’t be able to make any of the suggested changes unless you’re an experienced web developer. That raises the prospect of having to pay an expert to make the changes for you.

And if you don’t have the money to spare, then those vital changes may never get made, your site will stay slow and frustrated potential customers will continue to spend their money elsewhere.

So how can a business with a limited budget speed up its website without spending a small fortune?

The answer is Website Builder from 123 Reg.

Now we could spend some time talking about how we’ve integrated deep CSS and image optimisation into the backend of our Website Builder, but what matters most for you is the ability to a build superfast website without breaking the bank. Website Builder allows you to do just that.

Every Website Builder template we offer scores 90+ in Google’s PageSpeed Insights test. Here’s an example of the speed results for a real site created with Website Builder.

Website Builder’s drag and drop interface means you can build your own superfast business website without having to learn to code.

What are you waiting for? Start building your superfast business website with Website Builder now.