Is Your Slow Website Losing You Customers?

Waiting for a web page to load online is equivalent to the real world experience of waiting in a queue. Except online you can opt-out and go somewhere else incredibly easily.

Forrester Research and Gartner Group report that ecommerce sites in the US alone are losing $1.1. to $1.3 billion in revenue annually to customer click-away caused by slow-loading websites. Is your slow website losing you customers?

So what affects
website speed? There are three things. First, the speed at which the web server
processes the page; secondly, the broadband (or dial-up) connection speed of
the browser; and thirdly, the distance from the customer to the web server.

Recent advances in hardware mean servers process pages almost instantly and
1MB broadband or greater is available in most countries. The one thing that
hasn't changed is distance. New York to London is still 5580km and Hong Kong to
Los Angeles 7100km. Because web page load times increase proportionately to the
distance between browser and server you may be surprised to discover that the
speed of your website as experienced by you in London, for example, will not be
the same as experienced by your customers in Sydney or Delhi.

In fact the pages on your website may be so slow to load that your customers
may be abandoning your website. Recent research by Jupiter Research into web
browsing habits shows that web pages that take more than four seconds to load
experience a 33% drop-off rate.

Modern web pages, rich with content, often have more than 50 images,
scripts, styles and HTML frames. Each one requires a separate trip from browser
to server and, even though data travels at the speed of light, the cumulative
effect of these trips means slower web pages. In many instances way slower web
pages. In shopping terms, it's a bit like making individual trips to and from
the supermarket for every grocery item. You'll get there in the end, but it'll
certainly put you off shopping, or encourage you to think in a better way.

The main point here is - do not assume that your customers around the world
are having the same speed experience of your website as you. This, in
turn, could mean you are losing business and missing out on
opportunities - big time. The only way to determine this is to do a website
speed test; this will list the page load speed around the world. If you
identify poor page load time, especially in countries where you do business,
you can take action.

When you take the website speed test be prepared to be a little, if not a
lot, surprised!