To the everyday person, business owner, parent or child, 1 second can be a pretty irrelevant, fleeting moment. 1 second passing isn’t something we’d typically think twice about. But what about people who do? What about people who thrive off of second long moments (or less).
I immediately think about Olympic sprinters and swimmers. My mind goes back to the ’16 Rio games, where Usain Bolt took 1st place at a 9.81 100-meter dash time. How fast was the 8th place finisher? 10.06. Just a quarter of a second slower. Or maybe you think about Michael Phelps and his performance in the 100-meter butterfly on 2008’s World’s Stage. He had 50 meters to make-up for a time deficit of a half-of-a-second in order to take first place… and he did.
While 1 second in the everyday persons life is a quick, fleeting, unimportant moment in their lives, there are plenty of times where just 1 second can feel like an eternity and be a truly life altering moment.
The importance of 1 second is not exclusive to Olympic athletes or race car drivers, it is applicable to your online presence and your business’ bottom line. Did you know that a mere 1 second delay is causing you a 7% reduction in conversions?
That’s right. A period of 1 second matters heavily to your visitors and customer base. To lose out on 7% of your conversions is a big deal – that could be a visitor becoming a lead, or a lead becoming a customer. (Or in this case, neither – because you made them wait.) From an SEO and ranking perspective, if you take longer to load, you’ll be ranked lower than those that are quick. That same 1 second delay costing you conversions, also yields an 11% drop in page views.
Well what about 2 seconds? Or even 3? Almost half of customers and visitors, 47% to be exact, expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less. And if it takes 3 or more seconds to load, 40% of your visitors are abandoning your site.
Aside from immediate conversions or views, site speed will affect you long term as well. Slow site speed can negatively impact brand loyalty; 52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty. Even worse, 79% of customers who report dissatisfaction with website performance are less likely to buy from that same site again.
A 1 second delay decreases customer satisfaction by about 16% – and in a world where people trust their friends and peers more than advertisements, 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online. (And you can bet that their friends probably will vow not to make the same mistake.)
This is a roll-call for all of the business owners who don’t like to lose customers. Stating the obvious, site speed is incredibly important. At beMarketing, we think like Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps – we understand the importance of a 1 second moment. At no cost to your business, beMarketing can provide you a site evaluation and consultation, including a site-speed-rating. Let us know you want to see where you stand here.
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