In the digital age, your business’s website is the equivalent of a shop’s storefront.
Your site should entice and inform visitors so that they know what and why they should buy from you. However, it doesn’t matter how engaging your “storefront” is if the inside of the shop is too cluttered to walk through and the checkout is too slow to wait for.
In the same way store traffic can lose potential customers, so too can your site’s performance.
Site performance primarily refers to the speed at which your web pages and the various elements contained on those pages (images, videos, buttons, etc.) load and respond. Web pages that load slowly and are difficult to navigate have “poor” site performance, while speedier and more responsive sites have “good” site performance.
Research shows that your site’s bounce rate (the percentage of users that leave your site after viewing only one page) is strongly influenced by site performance. A study by Akamai Technologies found that 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That means you’re also losing 40% of the traffic that you paid to generate through digital advertising. In other words, if you don’t optimize your site before advertising, you’re spending money only to have nearly half of your ad traffic immediately leave!
Luckily, it takes even less than 3 seconds for site performance optimization to start benefiting your company. Amazon reported a 1% increase in total revenue for every 100 millisecond improvement in page load speed. Similarly, Walmart converted an extra 2% of potential customers into sales for every 1 second of improvement.
Site speed even impacts your ranking in search engine results, so optimizing your site performance ought to be part and parcel of your SEO strategy.
A third-party site auditing tool can provide a clearer picture of your site’s performance, as well as help you plan to improve it. Google’s free and open source Lighthouse program will audit any of your web pages and generate a report that scores your site’s performance, accessibility, and more. Scores above 80 mean your website is performing well in that category; anything less than that means you have plenty of room to optimize performance and reap the benefits of a faster and more accessible site.
Although Lighthouse and other web page auditing tools can identify problems with site performance, they won’t solve them. That’s where the legwork of technology experts comes in. As part of CTComp’s digital services, we both monitor and optimize your site’s performance. Site performance isn’t an after-the-fact concern for us; we are highly conscientious of performance optimization during the web or app development process.
It is important to give your site’s performance the same attention you give its content and design. Reducing your bounce rate gives your site more opportunities to shine, thus increasing the likelihood of converting a visitor into a lead or sale. Make the best impression possible by optimizing your site’s performance with CTComp’s robust digital services.
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