How long do you wait for a website to load?

According to statistics, half of us don't even wait 2 seconds for website content to appear! If it takes longer, they quickly drop out.

Website loading speed affects user experience, search results and even sales and conversions.

Read in this blog 5 reasons why website speed is important and how to improve it.

1. We expect speed, otherwise we drop out.

Your customers, readers and website visitors make snap judgments. If your website loads quickly, it immediately gives a good first impression. A quick-win for the user experience.

How's this? It's pure psychology. We see fast websites as professional and reliable. We link speed to efficiency, reliability.

79% of online buyers say they won't go back to a website if they've had problems with loading speed.

You don't get a second chance when it comes to user experience. Nearly 80% of your potential audience will not return.

The Internet sets the bar high when it comes to site speed. We expect and demand fast load times.

Here are the hard facts:

 47% of people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds.

 40% will abandon it completely if it takes longer than 3 seconds.

You get a little more wiggle room with mobile visitors, but not much.

 85% of Internet users expect a mobile site to be as sn

2. User Experience

User experience, or UX design is all about creating a great and simple experience for your visitors. There are two basic factors for a positive user experience:

1. Give visitors what they are looking for.

2. Give them it fast.

Therefore, website loading speed is your first priority when it comes to user experience.

3. Website speed affects your Google ranking

Google has a mission to make sure the Internet is super fast, easily accessible and useful. So far, they are doing pretty well.

We see that they are going further and further in this. And this is now affecting your ranking in the google search engine. Some statistics from the Google/Deloitte research report:

If the loading time at Google is 500ms longer it results in 25% fewer searches.

By improving load time by 0.1s you can increase conversion by 8%.

4. Slow websites lead to fewer conversions

Back to one of the statistics from a moment ago:

40% of people leave your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Let's say your website has 10,000 visitors a month. And your website takes 4 seconds to load, you could lose 4,000 potential customers.

Do these numbers seem a bit excessive to you? They're not. Amazon has done tests that showed they would lose $1.6 MILLION per year if their website loaded 1 second slower.

5. The long-term effect of a low website speed

We have found that a low loading speed leads to an immediate drop in visitors. Almost half of your potential visitors are already gone. But there is a long-term effect here, too. That long loading time gradually inhibits your natural growth and word of mouth.

Customers slowly stop referring your business to others because of a bad experience. Other websites are less likely to refer back to your content. And it may even discourage people from signing up for your newsletter.

What can you do about this?

If there were one solution to make your Web site faster, that would be great. Unfortunately, it's all a bit more complex. Quality of hosting, server response time, too large images, too many plugins, too large scrips but also the quality of the code determine the loading time. The more complex the website, the greater the effect on the loading speed.

First of all, it is important to gain insight into the loading speed of your website. Brightness has developed a tool for this purpose that you can use for free. This will give you a better idea of the speed of the website, but we also give you tips on what you can do to make the loading time faster.

<Test your website speed for free>

Sources: Kissmetrics , Google/Deloitte