Visiting a website with slow loading times is frustrating. Sure, a page with flashy graphics, slick animations, and artsy design features might look nice, but if it’s functionally limited then what’s the point?
One of the hallmarks of a great web developer is the ability to hit that sweet spot between attractive layout design and adequate load speed optimization. After all, it’s a crucial component if you’re to keep potential customers on your webpage.
That said, being a web developer requires skills that most of us don’t possess, so it’s understandable for a website owner to struggle. If you’re happy with how your website looks, it may well be falling short of performance expectations — and that’s troubling given that nearly half of us won’t wait longer than 3 seconds for a shopping site to load up.
That’s just one of the big reasons why it’s vital for your site to load quickly. Below, we’ll delve more deeply into why having a speedy site can’t be anything less than a priority. Here we go.
First Impressions Are Crucial
As noted, our attention spans are minuscule when it comes to how long we’re willing to wait for a page to load. This fact becomes even more pertinent when you consider that your business has only 7 seconds to make a positive first impression. What are you going to do with that time? What does your website look like within the first few seconds?
When you’re setting up your first website, it’s tempting to load it up with high-res images and stack the UI with special effects and animations. After all, you want it to look slick and professional — but those additions come at a cost, holding back the performance and potentially turning your site into a sluggish mess. The foundation needs to be usability achieved through a combination of fast load speed and functional UI design.
Regardless of your site’s primary purpose (be it to sell, inform, or entertain), your audience will lose interest fast if your load times don’t match their expectations. And when that interest fades, it won’t come back. It’ll be replaced by interest in rival sites that meet or exceed those expectations. Can you really afford to let that happen?
You must focus on making good first impressions, then — and to do this, you need to think about all platforms through which your visitors may view your site. Being mobile-responsive hasn’t been optional for a long time. Use Google’s free mobile-friendly test to ensure you’re catering to mobile visitors, and generally make an effort to provide strong functionality regardless of how people choose to interact with your site.
If you can do this, your hard-earned traffic won’t go to waste. Leads will be impressed by your website and act upon that by sticking around and becoming positively inclined towards your brand. Start as you mean to go on.
Speed Affects Your Search Rankings
Whether you’re an SEO whizz-kid or you’re less familiar with how search engines dictate rankings (you can learn more here, so take a look), upping your page speed is a simple and effective way to get your website seen more frequently. Improving performance will help your page appear higher up in Google’s results pages (other search engines are available, though perhaps not consequential).
Why? For starters, Google actively penalizes any sites with slow load times because they provide a terrible page experience for users. Visitors simply don’t want to wait around, so you can expect your page to appear further down the results page if your website is a little sluggish. And if someone does stick around, they’ll be less likely to convert (more on this soon).
How can you fix this, then? One of the best ways to give your site a quick boost is to take a look at your hosting provider. If it’s been a while since you set up your page, it may be worth investing in an upgrade.
Many hosts have blisteringly fast response times, but we’d recommend choosing a host based on their individual features, as many providers specialize in different areas, making them more suited to different niches. For instance, if you’re running on WordPress, Cloudways can pair a free migration with a baked-in Cloudflare integration to deliver strong and secure performance throughout the world.
If you’re not looking for the fastest WordPress hosting, or even the most secure, you can find something less complicated. It’s important to do the research to find something that suits your exact needs. PC Magazine has a good roundup of 2022 options that can give you an idea of the pros and cons of each provider, helping you make the right choice for your eCommerce site. However, it’s important to do your research! Use a comparison site to weigh-up the pros and cons of each provider to ensure you make the right choice.
Faster Load Speed Means Higher Conversion Rates
Run an eCommerce store? Ensuring your website loads quickly should be one of your highest priorities. A study from Google found that a speed increase of just 0.1 seconds can boost the number of shoppers adding items to their baskets by more than 9%. Staggeringly, a 100-millisecond delay can result in a 7% decrease in conversions. Take a look at these conversion rates based on load times sourced from recent research:
Page Load Time (in seconds)
Conversion Rate
2.4
1.9%
3.3
1.5%
4.2
1%
5.7+
0.6%
Of course, this is less of an issue if you’re not trying to sell anything. Given the stats though, we reckon that’s unlikely — online retail sales are set to grow 50% in the next 4 years, with the current market value of the industry recorded at $4.9 trillion. And if you’re not planning to ever sell any products through your site, you’ll still want to monetize it in some way to take advantage of the traffic. Doing otherwise is leaving money on the table.
In addition to following the aforementioned steps, you should keep an eye on your image sizes. Using image compression plugins (or sites such as TinyPNG or Squoosh) can help you avoid using more space than you need to, cutting back your required server resources and giving your website visitors better experiences.
If you’re using WordPress, a free plugin like W3 Total Cache can also help you to cache your web pages. This is one of the best ways to speed up your website, as caching stores copies of all the bulky files on your site. This reduces the load on the host’s servers when a user loads your page, ensuring that load times are minimal. [Editor’s note: another one we like is WP Rocket.]
Website load speed matters — hopefully we’ve been able to convince you of that! Find that balance between great design and optimized content, and we’re sure you’ll have no trouble keeping the attention of any visitors that come your way.
About the Author
Rodney Laws is an ecommerce expert with over a decade of experience in building online businesses. Check out his reviews on EcommercePlatforms.io and you’ll find practical tips that you can use to build the best online store for your business. Connect with him on Twitter @EcomPlatformsio.
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Online reviews, whether positive or negative, affect your reputation.
That in turn impacts your revenue. For example, BrightLocal found that 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has 4 or more stars.
That’s because customers see your online review profile and believe those reviews. According to Inc. Magazine, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from family and friends.
Don’t go nuts. Watch your review velocity; review sites and Google certainly do. If you get too many reviews too fast, they may be seen as purchased links or spam and be filtered out.
Diversity is important. If a citation site you’re listed on features reviews and you have none there, your citation is incomplete. It reduces your authority and your credibility.
Action Plan: how to manage your online review profile
Look yourself up by name
The first thing that jumps out at people is your Google Knowledge Panel at the top right. This is probably the most important place for you to have online review stars. If you don’t have any stars here, this is the first place to get them.
What other citations appear on the page? Your Facebook page may show up, perhaps a MerchantCircle page, maybe a Yelp listing, and maybe others. Do they have review stars? If not, those should be the second priority for you.
Online reviews don’t just happen
A good online review profile doesn’t just happen. If you have an unhappy customer their anger or disappointment provides built-in motivation for them to leave you a bad review. Happy customers are less likely to write a review without a little prompting.
Some businesses post a sign that says something like “We welcome your review on Yelp.” Or some variation on that. That plants the suggestion in the customer’s mind that they can (should) share their opinion of you.
Beyond that, you can also ask your customer for a review. Some businesses do that at checkout. Others that have customer email addresses send them an email request for a review with a link to your listing on the platform of your choice to make it easy for them.
Check out your niche
Do a keyword search like car repair shop in Morristown. Or New Jersey elder law attorney. Which industry sites and local directories show up? You may find something like a Morristown business directory. Or you may find a directory of elder law attorneys. If those directories accept online reviews, you need to have some there. If the site is fee-based, you may need to consider the relative value, but many are free.
Check out your competitors
Which of your competitors show up for your most important keywords? Search those keywords and make a note of which competitors are showing up on the first page or two. And then look up those competitors by name and see where they have citations with review stars. Those are all places you should also have reviews. Go through at least the first three pages of results for each competitor to catch the most important citation/review sites.
Consider broader sites as well
There are a number of more generic sites that are powerful sources of online reviews. Some of the best ones include:
It’s not enough to just ask customers for reviews. You need to respond to reviews as they appear. It’s normal for reviews to appear that you haven’t requested. And not all of those reviews will be glowing.
Responding to reviews promptly is associated with a 33% increase in conversions. We talk about the importance of monitoring and responding to reviews in our post Respond to Reviews and Get More Business.
As you might imagine, it can be quite time-consuming to monitor all of the places that host reviews for you. Fortunately there is the relatively easy solution. Most of our local SEO clients subscribe to a service that, among other things, sends them an email every time a new review is posted, with a link to that review so they can reply. If that’s of interest to you, reach out to me and I’ll explain how it works.
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