Expectation vs Reality

Did you know the average website load time in 2018 was around nine seconds on desktops and 22 seconds on mobile devices however most users are expecting less than three seconds?

How many times have you browsed to a site only to close it before it finished loading?

Effects Of A Slow Website

On average 53% of people will abandon your website if a page takes more than three seconds to load and the longer it takes the higher the number of people who abandon.

Even a one-second delay in your site loading can make a big difference (up to 7% lost conversions). Amazon did some testing and found that a one second slow down in their site would cost them $1.6 billion a year in lost sales.

Google is known to take page speed into consideration when ranking the pages it displays in search results, the slower your site the lower your ranking.

What You Can Do About It

There are many options available here are just a few:

• CDN and Caching Services
• Reduce the amount of bandwidth required to access your site
• Better Website Hosting
• Test the speed of your site
• Remove external links and scripts that slow down your site.

Real World Example

Our own website was taking around 20 seconds to load and using around 2 MB of data which was causing most people not to bother using the site. Applying the above techniques we have reduced our page load times to less than 2 seconds and around 500 Kb of data.

While it is too early to tell exactly how much difference it has made, traffic has definitely increased and the site is much nicer to navigate around.

The Finer Details

It is important to note that just turning on a service is not enough to fix all your speed issues, each service required tweaking to your specific conditions and adjusting to obtain the best results. Hawkins IT Solutions can help.