Five reasons why web speed matters

Website loading speed is one of the most frustrating additions to modern day life.

Since the dawn of the internet, users have struggled with waiting for webpages to load content in a timely fashion.

That frustrating ‘circle of doom’ and the pixelated image of your prospective new pair of shoes just doesn’t match our ‘of-the-moment’ lifestyle. ​Website load times​ can be just as important as the usefulness of the website itself in telling your friends about it.

You would think that with the advancements in tech, things would only improve as the years went by. But sadly, here we are waiting and waiting for the loading time to catch up with time.

With web speed a common problem and feature on all sites, from accessing blogs to tracking your online presence on a ​social media tracker​, the web speed of the site is ever more important on an e-commerce site.

Keep reading to discuss the importance of webspeed and why this feature should be heavily focused on when optimising and improving your online store.

1. Website performance​ is i​mportant

40% of users abandon all hope if a website fails to load within three seconds – missing out on the information, the potential business partnership and even the shoes. It’s a problem for users and businesses alike, both wanting to give or receive instant information.

But for businesses, a potential loss of a sale could be damning. Amazon states that a 100-millisecond delay could lead to revenues of an online company dropping by 1%. In the world of e-commerce, webspeed matters too, and businesses should consider this when reviewing their web appeal to new and existing customers – if they stuck around that long!

Reputational awareness plays a key part where one user’s review of the problem with the ‘webspeed matter’ when accessing the page could potentially put off other potential customers. High performing sites always engage and retain users better than lagging and broken links and this is a fundamental principle in the matter of web publishing.

Users expect and demand a high performing site, if they don’t get it, then they will go and find it somewhere else.

2. The matter of Google PageSpeed

Google PageSpeed allows developers to check and review the loading times of their web pages. Now this may not be your go-to website to check if those shoes are going to load within three seconds, but for developers and publishers, it’s key to establishing how long it takes for your page to load – which also tells us how long a person may hang around for.

This useful tool can help ensure only essential information is loading – attractive banners, images and flashy graphics could be doing more harm than good.

By making small changes to the user interface and re-checking your Google PageSpeed score, you can improve the page’s performance without impacting on content, and style, and the user will be more likely to think this is a better quality website with quality content.

This important and free tool, then leads us to our next matter.

3. Making the best UI performance

When designing the site, the most important position to put yourself in is that of the end user. By putting yourself ‘in their shoes’ you can really understand what it will be like for a potential customer, client or visitor when they first hover the cursor above your link and await the results.

Ask yourself, what does the customer want to achieve? How does the customer bypass information and sections not relevant and get straight to the shopping? What slows the process down and what will in turn affect webspeeds?

Acting out as a client will really help you adjust the pages to meet the exact requirements of the shopper or user – 40% off headbands are great, but does it just slow the process to get me to my shoes? People demand relevant information and quickly.

Getting bogged down with things of irrelevance, style over substance, and slow loading, can deter people from clicking on that payment submit button. “If the website is this bad, then the product must be equally as bad?”

It’s also important to know that different web features can also work differently on different platforms. In the age of mobile, having a UI that works on all platforms is the key to building up your hit count.

4. Browsers matter

Over 65% of global internet users browse using Google Chrome. Formulating your UI to work well with this browser will help you capture the 65% of potential clients out there but not walking through the other browsers will damage your webspeed reputation.

And as stated previously, you don’t need rotten apples to leave rotten reviews regarding your webspeed when you’re trying to make that first impression count – so don’t add fuel to the FireFox. Ensuring that each browser is catered for and the site works well on any platform will give you the ​edge​ over your competitors.

People rarely change browsers mid-browsing to check if the website loads quicker and better on a different platform. “This website is taking ages to load but all the other sites I’ve visited were fine today – the problem is the website – time to leave.”

Forgetting to accommodate universally will seriously impact on your performance and webspeed, and seriously impact on your site’s success rate – where others will capitalise – test this out on similar sites, if they load quicker, act now – become a site sneaker!

5. The host with the most

A sure fire way to make sure you are firing from all angles is to have a good infrastructure behind you. The key is to obtain a server capable of webspeeds you currently need – and your future goals.

If you want to attract the 100% of the global browser brigade, then having the hardware from some of the ​leading rackmount servers​ with you will futureproof your business, your view count, your speeds and your success story!

Spending valuable money on valuable hardware is your primary step to making sure you have a good basis for growth and your webspeed worries are shelved.

Bottom line

Webspeed matters – it matters to your customers and it should matter to you. Ensuring you take onboard these five key facts will improve your site, your business and your outcomes and get you off to a running start for improvement.