We’ve all seen the studies from big websites on how speed affected their business – Amazon losing $1.6 billion in sales because of a slowdown of just a single second, for example.
And you probably just thought, well, I’m not Amazon, I’m not losing billions, why should I care about a second?
Let’s see what happens with a small publisher with less than 50,000 pageviews a month. I tested this on my wife’s small publishing website.
This little graph shows how the bounce rate is affected by the speed of the website.
- we have 46% bounce rate when the speed is one second
- bounce rate goes up to 75% when the speed is 3 seconds
That’s pretty self-explanatory, people don’t like to wait. Those two extra seconds mean you lose 30% of your visitors.
Can you afford to lose 30% of your traffic?
This graph represents the user engagement behavior and how website loading time is impacting it.
- we have 4.17 pageviews/user when the speed is under a second
- it goes down to 1.70 pageviews/user when the speed is 3 seconds
The conclusion is pretty straightforward – you’re losing traffic, engagement & money.
You don’t have to be Amazon, Google or eBay to start making your website load faster. In fact, if you’re a small publisher, it’s even more critical because it’s a jungle out there in the publishing world.
So, making your WordPress website faster is a must:
- get better hosting
- use well-coded themes
- install a cache plugin
- optimize your images
- clean up your database
If you need help, get in touch with us.
Leave a Reply