You’ve been there right? You’ve typed in the URL you want to go to… you’ve clicked the link… the screen turns white and you wait. One… two… three… four… finally the website appears, but you were just about to click on to another destination. Your website’s load time can have a very significant impact on your website traffic, your bounce rate (the number of people who “bounce” to another site before engaging with yours), and your conversions. Let’s face it, people are impatient when they are browsing the web, and if your website is slow, they will move on to one that isn’t. If you are using your website with the focus being to sell something or to generate conversions, it is critical that your website is finely tuned. Check out these statistics from the the Wired Magazine Blog.

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 40% abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.
• 79% of shoppers who are a dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from same site again.
• 52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.
• As little as 1 second of delay decreases customer satisfaction by about 16% – every second counts.
• 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online.

You should also consider that Google has stated on more than one occasion that the speed of a website has an impact on search engine rankings (spoiler alert: slow websites rank lower than fast websites). This can impact both your organic search engine rankings and also your pay-per-click Google AdWords campaigns if your business or organization is running those. Interested in checking your website’s speed? It’s easy to do… just visit Google Metrics or Pingdom tools for a quick and easy test of your website’s current speed.