Your slow WordPress web hosting is losing you customers

A lot of people check a few things when they are choosing their webhosting, including :

• price – cheaper is cool
• support – like when something goes wrong, there is someone to help
• nothing – yes, I’ll accept the hosting that comes with my website build

Not a lot of people consider how the performance of the website will effect the audience, customers, and bottom line.

That’s why you built your website right ? to get new customers ? you want to make a good first impression.

A typical WordPress website loads in around 10 seconds, some are slower and 10-20 seconds is common enough. It is easy to be beyond 20 seconds if you have a sliding banner or lots of plugins on your site.

An site with optimized WordPress hosting can load in under 2 seconds. Find out about our super fast WordPress website hosting.

You might wonder ‘how fast is my site’ ? This is the easiest website speed test tool I’ve used, make sure you select Sydney (as that will test your site for what an Aussie sees).

Google ranks you higher if your page is faster – better SEO

A lot of SEO is guessing, this one is documented by google

“we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings”,  source : https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

The faster your page, the better your search engine ranking. I’d say this alone is enough to pay for faster hosting.

Web page abandonment

This is where a prospect clicks on your search result, and waits … waits … and your page doesn’t open quickly enough, they simply click another link, or click back and then another link.

It’s like when you walk into a retail shop, and the assistants are all chatting to each other, or on the phone. Do you wait ? sure sometimes, but some customers will just walk out.

Often this ‘abandonment’ doesn’t even register with google analytics(GA), as GA only measures pages once they’ve completely loaded in the browser.

The graph below shows the longer the response time, the greater the abandonment (click the graph to enlarge it).

Reduced web sales

Now if you’re selling on the web, you seriously need to look into how fast your WordPress web hosting is.

 

Roughly every addition 1 second in page load time equates to 7% eCommerce sales loss.

Say your website is loading in 7 seconds , over the year you’ll have lost 15%-35% of your eCommerce sales. That is a real simple business case for eCommerce website to move to faster hosting.

Slow pages are just downright frustrating

This info graphic shows the whole slew of issues from poorly performing websites.

Your bounce rates will also be increased, people really can’t be bothered with slow sites.

 

 

 

By Scott Farrell on February 13th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress