Is it Worth it to Invest in Speeding up your Site?

Before you start A/B testing, one of the things you need to do is ensure your website speed is running in optimal conditions. As a business, site speed can make or break your chances on being successful. Having slow speeds can turn off potential customers in a matter of seconds. The internet is a big place, and if one page is not cutting it, there are literally hundreds more that will. All it takes is a few seconds of lag, and you lose your business.

In a recent webinar hosted by Convert, Yottaa‘s conversion marketing specialist – Lucy Orloski – conveys the impact of site speed in conversion, user engagement, and revenue. In other words, they conveyed the importance of having a fast site so you can have paying customers to keep your business profitable. For more information, you can watch the entire webinar here.

Lucy Orloski has been doing conversion marketing for about 8 years now. In the past, she’s worked in large-scale SEM, and spent three and a half years at a company called HubSpot. Today though, she’s working with Yottaa to help businesses speed up their websites, increase conversion, user engagement and revenue. Yottaa’s primary product is user engagement styles, a cloud offering that helps speed up sites to increase the aforementioned functions. Their list of customers branch from all verticals but particularly are from the e-commerce and financial service sectors. Some of many reasons shoppers are turning to internet retailers are:

• Speed
• Efficiency
• Convenience

Having a website that runs slower than your competitors could mean a huge economic loss.You have to realize that you do not control the market and you have to stay competitive. One of the biggest ways you can do that is by making sure that your website is up to par with the speed of other websites.

Boosting Your Speed

According to Boris Demaria’s article – 20 Quick Tips to Optimize Page Load Time,

Web page loading speed is the most crucial part of a site’s usability and SEO. Google considers page speed to be one of the 200 ranking factors that influence a website’s position in organic search results and is known to enrich user-experience

On a higher level, there are two ways you can make a site faster;

1. Manual
2. Automated

If you decide to go manual, you can have a developer or an engineer execute different technical techniques to speed up the site. The automated option however, gives you the option to invest in a service like Yottaa or different pieces of web infrastructure like CDN to solve different performance problems. Let’s say your website takes 6 seconds to load and you invest in a few of the techniques in question and manage to bring the load speed down to 3 seconds. Is it going to be worth further time and money to get that number to say 2 seconds?

When deciding this kind of thing, there are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself, since in the first place, you want a clear answer:

• What should you be aiming for?
• How much would you be willing to invest in your own time or budget to increase the site performance?

Understand How Your Website Runs

The reality is it’s different for each individual site simply because each is different from the other. They are unique in the way they have been built, the kind of content that’s on them and so on. Thus, the hit list or things you would do to make improvements on each website is different. What else is going to be different is the cost and time associated with executing those tests.

As Lucy pointed out in her presentation, if you can manage to get your site down to 3 seconds, you’re doing very well. And if you can get it below 3 seconds, it will no doubt pay off for you. It should be a priority to get the site to 3 seconds, and if after that there are relatively inexpensive things you can do to speed it up even further, absolutely go for it.

[Tweet “After a load speed of 2 seconds, abandonment rate increases 6.7% per second”]

If you notice on your list that performance problems still persist, and they would take a considerable about of time and money to work through, then it’s probably not worth it to get your site down from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds. This is specific to you and your own situation though: your individual business.

So, what steps can you take to increase your own site speed? This is the kind of stuff that exists on a spectrum. As conversion marketers, the goal here should be to really target that 3-second mark because that’s where people’s attention spans are. If your site is not loading within 3 seconds, what you’re doing is losing people. And if you can manage to get below that 3-second bar, you will be losing less of that. After that, you will have a bit of breathing space and wiggle room to make further improvements you wish to make. For more information about conversion optimization, visit us at Convert. If you want to find out more about site speed or if you want to watch the full presentation, you can watch the entire webinar here.

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