Can the Speed of Your Website Have an Effect on Your Business’s Success?

The answer to that is yes. Even if your site isn’t loading too slowly, it could potentially be loading slower than your competitor’s website. According to a survey conducted by Gomez.com and akamai.com almost 50% of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they typically leave a site that is not loaded within 3 seconds. 80 % of people shopping online say that they will not return to a site if its web performance is low grade. Fortunately website speed can be fixed, and there are tools to test your website speed.

Website visitors care about the speed of the website first, think of it as a first impression, before they get to see the actual face of the website and the nice elements we add to make our websites stand out from a competitors.

To show an example we decided to compare two prominent and frequently visited websites, the NHL site and the NBA site. We ran a test using www.webpagetest.org . This site uses a letter grading system, A being the best and F being the worst. The results were as follows:

NBA results

NHL results

As you can see, the NHL site is performing significantly better than the NBA site. The NHL just re vamped their site, which definitely plays a role in these test results.

The next two charts below show the load time for both websites. The NBA site takes almost 22 seconds to load, which is an incredibly long time, while the NHL site only takes 6.5 seconds to load. These sites are one of a kind so people will wait for the site to load, but imagine if this was the difference between you and your biggest competitor’s site? The large loading time gap would definitely play a role in which site will be visited and talked about more frequently.

While load time does not have a huge impact on Google rankings, it can affect your conversion rate. Every second that is taken off of load time will increase a customer’s confidence in your site. In this case, even a few seconds can make all the difference.