Do Website Load Times Really Matter?

When was the last time that you checked the speed of your website? When you’re busy researching topics, writing articles and performing the countless number of other tasks that go into maintaining a successful website, it’s easy to overlook something as simple as website load times. Besides, how much of a difference does a couple of really make? The reality is that those critical seconds could mean the difference between generating a sale and having the visitor exit your site.

Amazon’s Study on Website Load Times

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, conducted a study several years ago to determine how load times affected their sales. The e-commerce giant found that for every additional 1ms that visitors were forced to wait for the site to load, it saw a 1% decrease in sales. From an outsider’s perspective, a 1% decrease in sales may not sound like much. However, you have to realize that Amazon netted more than $107 billion last year, so that translates into more than $1 billion in lost sales for every 1ms increase in load times.

Google’s Study on Website Load Times

Amazon isn’t the only company who’s studied the impact on website latency. Google conducted a similar study a while back, in which it discovered that just a half a second increase in load times resulted in 20% less traffic. That’s a pretty substantial amount considering that Google is the world’s largest search engine.

Google Search Ranking Signal

Did you know that Google uses site speed as a ranking signal? In other words, fast-loading websites will receive a slight boost in their Google search ranking when compared to slow-loading websites. This isn’t breaking news by any means, as the Big G first announced the use of site speed as a ranking signal back in 2010. Google wants to promote a positive experience for all of its users — and this means ensuring that results load fast and error-free.

Ways to Speed Up Your Website

Now for the million-dollar question: how can I speed up my website? Well, there are several different steps you can take to reduce your site’s load times while promoting a more positive user experience. See below for a list of essential tips and tricks for speeding up a slow-loading website:

Reduce the number of scripts running on your website.
Place scripts at the bottom of your site’s HTML so visitors load them last.
Optimize images using a “lossless” tool before uploading them to your site.
Choose a reputable, trusted web host.
Enable GZIP compression.
Enable browser caching.
Minify resources used on your site.
Use a tool like t ools.pingdom.com to monitor load times.

Do you think website load times affect website sales or conversions? Let us know in the comments section below!