How Site Speed Could Be Affecting Your Bottom Line - JaguarPC How Site Speed Could Be Affecting Your Bottom Line - JaguarPC

How Site Speed Could Be Affecting Your Bottom Line

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There are many factors that contribute to how successful your online business ends up being. Most of it, of course, comes down to the choices you make and the execution of your strategy. Your choice of content, your marketing efforts, your pricing, and your customer service all play a big part in how effective your website is. But, what if you were told that many of the factors that you do control could be easily neutralized due to circumstances outside of your control? What if a third party was responsible for customers actually reaching all that great content you’ve been working on?

 

That’s exactly the situation you’re in with your web hosting company. The hosting solution you choose can have far reaching effects that you may not be aware of.

 

Luckily, you do have some semblance of control here because, after all, you’re choosing what web hosting company to use as well as the kind of hardware to house your site. Do you opt for VPS hosting? Do you try your luck with cheaper shared hosting? Be careful. Your hosting solution can have a big effect on your bottom line. What you may not know is just how much site speed can affect your business. Let’s take a look.

 

Customer Satisfaction

 

In the digital age, it’s probably safe to assume we’ve all become a bit, let’s say, impatient. We don’t like to wait, especially when it feels like we have the world at our fingertips in the form of a smartphone. That impatience carries over to our web browsing habits and, ultimately, our habits as consumers. Let’s say you’re looking to buy something. A few different places sell it, so scarcity isn’t really an issue. You go to the first site and after typing in the URL you are greeted with a blank browser tab that is displaying a loading icon. How long do you typically let his scenario play out? Twenty or thirty seconds? The statistics show that’s probably not the case. In fact, 40% of people say they’ll give a site three seconds (three!) to load before they move on to a different one. That is quite the bounce rate.

 

Let’s look at some other statistics from that same KISSmetrics study. A one second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16% during a transaction. If a customer had what they felt was a poor experience due to website performance issues during their first visit to a site, watch out because 79% of dissatisfied shoppers are less likely to shop with that site again. Finally, 52% of shoppers say a fast page loading time is important to their loyalty to a business.

 

So, that is how customers respond to site speed. How about the search engines they use to find your site?

 

Search Engine Optimization

 

Business owners concern themselves with SEO because they know how important it is to rank highly with services like Google or Bing. The thing to be aware of, though, is that search engine crawlers have become so sophisticated that they can approximate what a human viewer would want to see on a site. That means the site elements that are important to customers are the same ones Google wants to see. It’s been documented that site speed does play a role in Google’s algorithm to determine where they place your site on their search engine results pages. They’ve even created a PageSpeed Insights tool to really hammer home the fact how much value they put in this metric. If Google takes site speed seriously, so should you.

 

Conversions

 

Of course, what you’re really interested in is the bottom line. What do all these statistics mean for your revenue? Quite a bit, actually. If customer satisfaction and your SEO standings are lowered, it stands to reason your sales will drop as well. It’s been observed that each second of page response delay during a transaction can drop the likelihood of conversion by 7%. If we expand on that data point, that means if your ecommerce site currently brings in $100,000 a day (if so, great job!), a one second delay can cost you $2.5 million in sales over the course of a year.

 

Conclusion

 

If you’ve never considered just what a big decision determining the right web hosting solution can be, now you know. The speed of your site’s load times and its reliability play critical roles in your customers’ behavior. There is little room for error, so it’s important that you have the right hosting for your business website. Because mere seconds can have such a tremendous effect on your conversion rates, it’s recommended that you choose the fastest hardware that your budget will allow. That’s where the team at JaguarPC can help you. Contact us and we’ll be able to assess what your needs are and assist you in choosing the best monthly plan for your business.

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