The internet (and as a result, the entire world) is all about speed. People expect their orders to be fulfilled quickly, they expect cross-country shipments to happen overnight, they expect to be fully updated on the latest world news as it is happening and they expect every website that they visit to be fast. If yours isn’t, they are much more likely to browse the internet for something else (a fast world has shortened people’s attention spans) or worse, leave your site for a competitors.
In other words, in order to compete in a faster than light world, you need to have your Phoenix web design company make your website as fast as possible. Otherwise all of those hours laboring over your Phoenix SEO campaign were all for naught.
What is the difference between a fast website and a slow one?
Before you can have a website that is as fast as you need it to be, you should understand what defines a website as being fast. This will prevent you from being too lax or too harsh with your Phoenix web design company when you are pushing them to make your website faster.
Split seconds matter
The human eye is fast, so fast, in fact, that once it becomes adapted to something moving at a certain speed, it can detect speed differences that have to be measured in milliseconds. This means that the difference between your website being a fast and a slow one—and more importantly, the difference between a closed sale and cart abandonment—could be less than a second. This fact affects all businesses, no matter how large or small.
Here are a few examples:
- AOL recently noted that the average number of page views nearly triples (160 percent increase) for those who were in experienced top 10 percent of fastest load times.
- Amazon recently reported that a one tenth of a second increase in load times could reduce their revenue by three quarters of a billion dollars annually.
- In a case study, Bing slowed their load times by one and a half seconds. As a result, user satisfaction, revenue per user and click volume all dropped by an average of 4 percent. If the search engine giant had kept this up, you can expect that they would have seen losses similar to what Amazon calculated.
- During a major website overhaul, Shopzilla reduced their page load times by up to 5 seconds. As a result, they increased their page views by 25 percent and their conversion rates by up to 12 percent.
How do I make my website move faster?
Remove the clutter
A few years ago, Google did a case study where they measured searchers’ reactions to results that generated 30 sites at a time against results that measured 10 results at a time. The searches yielding 10 results won resoundingly, with 25% fewer searches coming from those who received a longer list of results. The study also concluded that the increased results more than doubled average load times (0.4 seconds for 10 results vs. 0.9 seconds for 30 results.
The above example shows just how much extra items on a website can slow a site down, to the detraction of a user’s perceived experience. This is why you should work very closely with your Phoenix web design company to erase any unnecessary or redundant clutter from your website.
Don’t forget about mobile
Despite the fact that they share the exact same internet space with laptops and desktop computers, cell phones and tablets exist within their own realm regarding their interface. This has resulted in altered experiences on the web (most notably mobile versions of websites).
Regardless of whether you use a responsive web design, an adaptive web design or a classic mobile/desktop version web design, you need to prepare your website for a speedy mobile experience, especially since about 2/3 of the population use mobile to access the internet.
Upgrading your website’s speed is just one piece of the puzzle
Having your Phoenix web design company improve your website’s load times is just one step. You also need to continue to optimize your Phoenix SEO campaign and making sure that your website has a utilitarian, user friendly design.