Why You’re Losing Money if Your Website Loads Slowly

Having a high-quality website is important for any company that wants to succeed. Providing detailed information about your company and the services or products you sell is important, as is having site that is responsive and can be easily accessed through a mobile device. While all of that is great, if your website isn’t loading fast enough you are losing potential customers and money.

Here’s why you’re losing money if your website is loading slow:

Google Measures Your Website Speed

According to MarketingCharts, Google accounts for more than half of all organic traffic that comes in through search engines. Google constantly keeps track of your site’s loading time. Since 2008, Google has taken site loading speeds into account when giving pages a quality score. Pages with a low-quality score will often have difficulty moving up in the search results. Although it’s not the only thing Google takes into consideration, it is one of the most important ones, along with providing relevant and high-quality information.

Slow Loading Websites Equal High Bounce Rates

If you already have a site then you probably already know what the term “bounce rate” means. Essentially, when a visitor leaves your website after visiting the page they landed on, this is called a “bounce”. If your site’s bounce rate is high Google may actually confuse your website for a low-quality website or a spam website.

Also, when visitors come into your website and “bounce” they are not converting into leads, therefore you are losing possible customers. Faster loading pages have much higher inbound leads and greater ROIs. According to MarketingCharts, more than 30% of users will leave a page that takes too long to load. That’s 30% of website visitors that you could have turned into customers but didn’t.

Faster Websites Can Reach a Wider Audience

If you’ve ever tried to load a site that was extremely slow or not responsive on a mobile device you know how frustrating it can be. According to MarketingCharts, 4 out of 10 visitors are coming to a site through a mobile device. If your website does not load efficiently and is not responsive you’ll quickly lose those customers. Sites that are mobile-friendly can also get better search engine rankings allowing you to reach more customers.

Indexed Pages

Google puts a huge emphasis now on mobile-friendly sites. The search engine has even modified search results to be different depending on the device you are using. If your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly there is a good chance that more of your pages will get indexed for both regular and long-tail keywords. This will ensure that your website comes up in more search results and higher up than your competitors.

Google is currently the leading search engine, which means that if you want to win more customers and gain an advantage over your competitors you’ll have to do what the “Google Overlord” requires.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to increase inbound leads and sales you’ll need to make sure your website loads quickly. By doing that you will not only get better search rankings and be accessible on mobile devices, you’ll also be able to increase your overall ROI.

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