How Speed Affects Your Website

Website Speed Infographic

Every website owner works towards having a top website. Creating quality content, making a website visually appealing, and doing search engine optimization are all good ways to make a site stand out. However, few people know speed plays a big part in a website’s success.

Just look at the sites that do well in search rankings. The top-ranked sites have an average load time of 1.9 seconds. Now contrast that with the overall average load times of 9.3 seconds for desktop websites. It becomes obvious everyone should at least familiarize themselves with how website speed works if they want success.

The infographic that follows is a valuable resource here. It covers the most important aspects of website speed. We’ll give you an overview.

A big part of the infographic deals with speed’s influence on user behavior. Internet users hate waiting. Therefore, if a website is slow, most people avoid it. Here are some facts that show this:

• If page load time is longer than 3 seconds, 53% of users leave the website
• 75% avoid returning to pages that take over 4 seconds to load

To top it off, longer load times result in less time spent on site and fewer page views per visitor. Therefore, if you want a well-visited site, speed optimization is definitely the way to go.

The second important thing is speed’s impact on online stores. With online stores, it’s essential to keep the customers happy. Unfortunately, each second of delay in page load times undermines this by reducing customer satisfaction by 16%.

This causes an avalanche of other problems. Customer satisfaction affects brand loyalty, shopping cart abandonment, publicity, and many other things. If customer satisfaction is low, all other aspects suffer too.

This leads to a direct correlation between website speed and conversions. Each time a second is added to the load times, conversions take a 7% hit. That’s why you need to optimize website speed to sell products.

This is just a part of the story. Read the infographic for more insightful stats and for more info on how website speed works.