Having a slow website does more harm than good. Discover five surprising effects of slow loading speeds on your business performance and profits. Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve spent hours on the internet trying to find a specific product, and when you finally find it, you realize that you’ve stumbled across a slow website? If yes, then you know how annoying that can be. It’s the same feeling a visitor gets if your website is slow. At some point, they will lose patience and find a faster alternative, causing you to lose a customer. And unfortunately, that’s not all there is. Here are the five main ways your slow website can influence your income.

Bad User Experience

Since the introduction of the internet, the average attention span of humans has drastically decreased. Studies show that 40% of visitors will leave your site if it takes more than a blink of an eye to load. That means losing profits from almost half of your potential customers. Moreover, over 50% of the visitors who experience slow website performance will leave comment about it, or tell their friends and family, for example. That can push away loads of customers. Due to the slow loading speed, your website may face bigger downtimes. If you have an eCommerce website, this will indeed affect your sales. The downtime makes your website inaccessible to your customers, directly decreasing revenues. One way to avoid this is to use a trustworthy web host. For example, you can explore managed WordPress hosting, VPS, or dedicated hosting as powerful alternatives. They will grant you an attractive uptime guarantee, robust security, and lightning-fast speeds.

Low Google Rankings

Google doesn’t usually give out information on how they rank the websites, but in 2010 they gave this information publicly. It’s very simple. If your webpage is slow, it will get a lower rating. If a webpage gets a lower rating, fewer people can find it. Ultimately, your profits might drop due to low traffic on your page.

High Bounce Rates

High bounce rates happen when visitors leave your website without performing any activity. Essentially, a high bounce rate indicates you are not meeting your visitors’ expectations. The most common reason for this is a slow-loading website. But apart from speed, it can be due to various other reasons. Still, high bounce rates will lower online visitors’ engagement with your website. They can cause your website to suffer from lower overall sales, directly affecting profits.

No Customer Loyalty

First impressions are always important; if they are negative, it’s bad. But, long-term exposure to slow-loading pages can be even worse. If a customer is dissatisfied with your site’s speed, there is a 79% chance that they will never return. Unfortunately, this means more money is spent on marketing to get new customers, causing your profits to be lower. After all, as the rule of marketing states, it’s much cheaper to retain old customers than to acquire new ones. So, it’s easier to convince people that bought something from you once to buy again. And one of the best ways to prevent losing

High Website Maintenance Costs

A slow website means spending more money on tools to shorten the loading time. If your page is ranked lower because of its speed, it will take a lot of time to get more traffic on your page. In this period, you would end up with more costs than profits because you may need to purchase tools that will help increase page speed. Investing more money in the beginning to improve your website’s speed is a good idea. Even though it may cost you initially, it will be worth it after some time passes. Also, if your page needs less time to load, it can reduce the operational costs of your business.

Conclusion

This article covers the basics, which is a great starting point. After learning what causes your profits to be lower, the next step is fixing your site speed. Find a good web host, build the website for mobile first, optimize your images, and create smooth animation. Always remember that your website’s speed is the deciding factor if a customer will stay, repurchase, or visit your site in the future, so make it a priority.