Why the speed of your website or webshop is important

Nowadays, one of the most important factors for Google is the speed of your website. The speed of your website reflects how quickly a website (or webshop) responds to web requests. Having a fast website is not only useful for website operators but for all Internet users. Fast websites ensure that visitors to your website stay longer on your website. After all, we all hate slow websites, and generally click away very quickly. We can say that a faster website is more user-friendly. And that’s what Google loves: user-friendly websites/webshops!

Fast website = longer visit!

Various studies (including this internal Google study) have shown that the faster your website or webshop is, the longer people spend on your website and the more pages they will visit. As a web shop owner, you don’t want your visitor to only visit one page. This immediately means that the visitor will not proceed to purchase and the chance that he or she will return is very small.

As a web shop owner, you want your visitor to visit at least a couple of pages. You need to make it as easy as possible for the visitor. And one of those ways is to offer the visitor a lightning-fast webshop or website.

A longer visit is of course very pleasant for you as a website owner. The visitor seems interested in ‘something’ on your website; a potential customer! But not only that: also Google sees that the visitor is on your site for a long time and will conclude that your website / webshop is probably relevant to the search query entered in Google. In short, a fast website ensures a longer visit. The longer visit indirectly has a positive influence in terms of SEO and ensures that visitors convert faster and more often.

Slow webshops/website costs money!

Above we described that a fast website ensures that the visitor on average will visit more pages on your website or webshop. But visiting more pages is not the goal. The goal is to get more conversions (a conversion is something you want the visitor to do. This can be a subscription to the newsletter, a sale, filling out a contact form etc.). And that is exactly what a fast website can bring about: an increase in conversion.

Visitors to your website or web shop generally want to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. We could say that they are very impatient by nature. Because impatient they certainly are. The Aberdeen Group researched that a delay of ‘just’ one second can yield a 7% difference in conversion; 1 second!

To make it more concrete: suppose you have a turnover of € 50,000 per month with your website. 7% of €50,000 is €3,500. If you look at this on a yearly basis (12x€3.500) you will end up with an amount of €42.000 which would be lost if your webshop would work one second slower!

Figure 1 clearly shows that the loading time of your shop has a major impact on the purchase behavior of a visitor. If the page loads too slowly, the majority of visitors will continue their search and probably end up at your competitor.

KISSmetrics came to the following conclusions based on research from Akamai and Gomez:

47 % of consumers expect a website to load within two seconds.
40 % of users leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
79 % of online shoppers who are dissatisfied with the speed of a web shop indicate that they are less likely to buy from the same web shop again.
52 % of online shoppers indicate that a fast loading time is important for their loyalty to the webshop.
Google ? speed

Earlier in this article, we talked about the fact that speed can have a positive influence on your Google rankings. We will now elaborate on that. Four years ago, Google officially announced that the speed of a website was definitively added as a ranking factor in the search algorithm. Besides the fact that a fast website is ideal for the visitor, it is also a lot more efficient for Google to crawl “fast website”.