Website load times aren’t always a priority. They need to be when you consider potential lost sales from a poor user experience and higher advertising costs!
Did you know that a slow website can actually cost you money? Whether it’s lost income from ads, or lost potential revenue from the people you were hoping to sell when they get to your website?
A lot of misconceptions out there about the consequences of having a slow website.
For the most part, when I meet with business owners and marketers, if website slowness comes up, it’s usually dismissed or not acknowledged as a big problem because, “meh”, people can wait, right! It’s just a couple more seconds. That’s actually WRONG!
A couple of items I want to share with you about why a website being slow is actually a bigger problem than you may think.
Happy Users Don’t Like to Wait
The first is user experience. That’s the most important one. When you have users that are using high speed internet, and are accustomed to clicking on a search on Google and getting to a website and seeing it within 2 seconds, and you have a website that takes 5-6 seconds, it’s very likely that this could frustrate users and they’ll just hit back on their browser and go onto the next website on the search results as they look to find a company or a provider for whatever product or service they’re looking for. That’s user experience. You’re going to give people a bad impression and drive them to another business.
Advertisers Don’t Like Their Customers to Wait Either!
Now let’s talk about higher advertising costs or higher costs in general. If you’re running an advertising campaign, whether it’s on Google Search, through Google Ads, or on other websites through Google’s Display Network, or Social Media ads, wherever it may be, these platforms look at a couple of different metrics when they’re trying to figure out how much they’re going to charge you to display your ad.
Most of these platforms use either a cost per impression or a cost per click model that determines how much you’re going to be paying.
Cost per impression is every time your ad displays, you pay.
Cost per click is every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay. Both ways, you pay. The question is how much?
Most of these platforms use some form of Quality Score. Essentially it’s a multiplier on your click cost. If you’ve got a website that loads slowly, that’s going to increase your click cost. It’s really important that you get a handle on the speed of your website, not just for user experience, but also to help reduce your ad spend and make your ad campaigns more efficient.
To learn more about how you can make your website load faster, please feel free to contact me, drop a comment below and we’ll be happy to take a look at your website to see what we can do to make your website run much more efficiently, run quicker, make your customers happy and drive down that advertising cost.
