First Impressions

First impressions are vital in today’s marketplace. Your customers, readers, and website visitors make an instant judgement about you and your business based on their experience with your website. If it loads fast, you’ve made a great first impression!

Here are some things that we’ve heard on this topic:

• Consumers consider fast websites to be professional and reliable.
• Decision makers relate speed to efficiency, trust, and confidence.

On the other hand, a slow website makes people think it’s unsafe, insecure, and untrustworthy. And it’s really difficult to turn around that negative first impression. 79% of online shoppers say they won’t go back to a website if they’ve had trouble with load speed. You don’t get a second chance when it comes to user experience.

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User Experience/Conversion Loss

As we mentioned, page speed is also important to your users’ experience on your site. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions – the number of people that come to your site and fill out the contact form or call you.

According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. So, in the amount of time it takes Billy Hamilton (one of, if not the fastest, players in Major League Baseball) to steal second base, 3.1 seconds – WHOA! – your site visitor will leave your site if the page has not loaded. Nearly 80% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again, and around 40% of them will tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.

This means you’re not just losing conversions from visitors that are already coming to your site, but that loss is magnified through their friends and colleagues as well. The end result is that you can be losing a great deal of potential sales because of a few seconds difference.