Consumers may be leaving your website before they even arrive. You don’t want to suffer from web page abandonment because consumers aren’t even seeing your web page. If they don’t see it, there’s no chance they can convert to a lead.
Many consumers are visiting your small business website on their mobile device. There are many reasons why someone might be interested in your website and then decide to abandon it.
For mobile users, which is now a large portion of your visitors, it’s probably because your website is too slow. You should do everything you can to make sure visitors are making it to your content.
Without someone making it to your content, you don’t stand a chance of converting them into a lead.
How People Browse
Have you ever paid attention to how you use your mobile device? I suspect your habits, like mine, are somewhat fickle and fast paced. There’s not a lot of patience to wait around.
If someone is browsing the internet or searching for something, it’s usually at one of two speeds:
- At home relaxing and on their fast home Wi-Fi internet.
- Out and about on their mobile providers slower internet.
The first one is great because your website will load fast. The second which is fairly common is more difficult because there are speed constraints.
People are impatient. If your website doesn't load fast, they'll leave. Share on XThose who are out and about on their mobile providers slow internet are looking for quick information. Maybe they’re in a store looking to compare prices, possibly they’re looking up a product to complement one they’re looking at in a store.
In all circumstances, a visitors on a mobile device isn’t going to wait around for 10 or even 5 seconds. Even 3 seconds feels like an eternity when you’re staring at your phone needing the information now.
People who are mobile browse with very little patience. The lack of patience decreases the chance of conversion.
Conversion Likelihood
A slow website will absolutely increase web page abandonment and bounce rate (they’re one in the same). Before your page even loads the likelihood of a conversion goes down dramatically the longer the page load time.
Consumers may be leaving your website before it even loads. Without consumers sticking around, your website’s purpose is lost. Your website goal is to convert visitors into leads. Your website isn’t there to look pretty, it’s there to expand your business.
Without people sticking around, there’s no chance they’ll ever turn into a lead.
Your Goal
Judging from the graph above, 1 to 3 seconds is ideal for a goal load time of a web page. Web page abandonment is going to always be an issues because people change their minds. The longer someone is given to change their mind, the higher the probability increases.
A load time of 1 second is ideal but that’s generally not realistic unless you have a hand coded website that cost you a significant amount of money. For most websites, a load time of under 3 seconds isn’t unreasonable. Sometimes one or two pages may have a longer load time, but most pages should be under 3 seconds.
A fast loading website will convert visitors into leads better than a slow website. Share on XIf you want to see how close to the goal you are, a good website to check speed is GTmetrix. The results show you suggestions on fixing the speed also.
Tackle Low Hanging Fruit
The lowest hanging fruit that is easy to change immediately is the image size. Efficient images on your website will help your website load as fast as possible.
That means you need to compress images before uploading them to your website.
In addition to the suggestions from GTmetrix, there are some other things you can do to increase the speed of your website.
Reaching Your Goal
There are some ways you can bring your web page speed down to possibly even the 1 second threshold. Google has recently been encouraging the use of AMP which is a stripped down speedy versions of your web page made specifically for mobile devices.
AMP can be used on any page but typically you’ll find them on blogs and news pages. For mobile devices, Google will prioritize showing the AMP version of a page over the regular version.
AMP doesn’t look as good as the full version of a web page but the speed more than makes up for the lack of styling. Here’s an image of what AMP looks like in its most basic form. You can click the image to see it for yourself even on a computer.
See How You Measure Up
Do you know how your website measures up in speed and other factors that determine your online presence? If not it’s time to get an idea so you know where you need to go to expand your business online.
An Online Presence Report is the perfect way to see what you can do to improve. The report is free and personalized for you. It’s a great way to get an idea of what you need to improve to perfect your small business online presence.