We all have different kinds of businesses, but let’s consider an e-commerce business. For every $1,000 an e-commerce site makes, a 1 second delay could cost it $25,000 per year. That means if it makes $5,000 per day with that same delay it’d lose $125,000 annually.
Crazy, right? So how much money are you losing every day just to save a few dollars a month on hosting?
In an internet usage survey by Gomez they found:
- More than 75% of customers left for a competitor’s site due to slow speed at peak traffic times.
- 88% of customers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
- Almost half of customers expressed a lower perception of the company overall after just one bad experience.
- Over ⅓ of customers told others about a bad experience.
Oh, and one last thing: Google now uses website speed as a search engine ranking factor. So your slow website could be losing you sales in more ways than one.
Your top competitor isn’t another business, it’s the website back button.
You’re probably losing more sales to customers leaving your website because it took too long to load than you are to competitors. Your top competitor isn’t another business, it’s the back button.
For more statistics on how website load time can affect sales, check out this infographic created by KissMetrics:
So if speed matters so much why do businesses pick cheap hosts? It’s usually because they don’t know the difference. Invest in quality, it’ll pay for itself many times over.
When the opportunity comes, will you be ready?
We’ve all seen them. Random events, news articles, TV, or radio coverage. Whatever it is, some small business gets featured in the media and they’re inundated all kinds of new business. Then their website goes down and it’s like they don’t even exist. Don’t let that happen to you.
Any business-class website that passes the speed test mentioned above will usually also pass the scalability test. This means that if you get a huge spike in traffic, your website can handle it and all of those new customers can find you.
Hosting companies do this in a multiple ways, but the most important thing is caching, which lets your website more easily serve thousands of customers at the same time. There are different ways to do caching which depend on the software your website uses and your server setup. There are also built-in solutions. For example, our websites handle caching and scaling automatically so our customers don’t have to think about it.
One last tip
One last easy way to improve performance is to optimize your images. You’d be surprised how many people upload massive images right off of their camera to use on their website. Not only is the image way larger than it needs to be, but it’s very ‘heavy’ and takes a long time to load because it’s not optimized (compressed) for the web.
So when uploading images to your website remember to:
- Resize images to the proper size
- Compress them with a free service like https://tinypng.com.