How Poor Website Performance Impacts Brand Revenue – And What To Do About It

At Blackbelt Commerce we understand the impact, poor website performance can have on your sales, which is why we have entered into a partnership with BigCommerce – they are committed to constantly improving page load times and the overall performance of your e-commerce site.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet, and leader of the American transcendental movement suggested, people should “adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience,” he was clearly speaking to people living in a world where the internet was yet to be invented.

Patience may be a virtue, it is not one possessed in great quantities by today’s online shoppers. If your website performs poorly, you’ll struggle to attract new or even hold on to existing customers. Your bottom line will suffer as a result.

 Need For Speed

The facts speak for themselves. According to research conducted by Kissmetrics:

• 47% of people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds.

• If a site fails to load in less than three seconds, 40% of potential customers will abandon it completely.

• 85% of internet users expect access to a site to be on their mobile device to load as fast or faster than on their desktop.

Amazon has calculated, that pages that took an additional second to load, would cost the company $1.6 billion in sales each year. Technicians at Google have estimated,  that search results slowed down by four-tenths of a second, the number of searches completed would fall by 8 million per day, stripping them of tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue. At the BBC, 10% of users are lost for every additional second the site takes to load.

According to research carried out by DoubleClick,  a subsidiary of Google which develops digital advertising: “Sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds observed: 25% higher ad viewability, 70% longer average sessions and 35% lower bounce rates.”

One of the many benefits of having a BigCommerce e-commerce store is, they are capable of achieving page load speeds that guaranteed to keep your customers happy

 Devastating Impact Of Delay

Slow website performance affects everything from individual transactions to customer retention and ultimately the amount of profit your enterprise makes. For an e-commerce site earning $10,000 per day, the loss of revenue due to poor performance could easily amount to $250,000 per year.

• 35% of customers will be less likely to purchase your products or services if your website performance is poor.
• 66% of consumers say the way a website performs influences their impression of a company.
• 33% of customers say they have been left with a negative impression of a company because it had a poorly performing website.
• “2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.” Maile Ohye, Google

How Customers Respond To Slow Sites

Slow page load times will affect your business in the 3  ways:

1. More abandoned shopping carts: Today’s customers expect near-instantaneous page load times. If your site is too slow, an increasing number of customers will abandon their carts before completing their transactions and likely seek out your competitors instead.
2. Loss of customer loyalty: Your customers may love your products or services, but if you consistently frustrate them with poor website performance, they will eventually look elsewhere. This will affect your sales, and also impact the reputation of your enterprise as a whole.
3. Lackluster marketing campaigns: The analytics necessary for finding the best ways to reach new customers depend on your existing data. If you are consistently losing data due to poor performance, you won’t have sufficient data to be able to grow your business, further hurting your bottom line.

Beyond all the research and theoretical studies, there are plenty of real-world examples that impact the improvement of your website performance can have.

• Family history website Ancestory.com saw a 7% increase in conversions after reducing the time its pages took to load by 64%.
• Frozen ready meal producer COOK saw its conversion rate rise by 7% after reducing the average page load time on its website by 0.85 seconds.

In 2016, the Financial Times declared that testing of its new, faster-loading website showed that readers were up to 30% more engaged with the site.

How To Boost Website Performance

At Blackbelt Commerce, we believe the easiest way to improve the performance of your site, is to migrate your e-commerce store to BigCommerce.  You will be able to choose from a stunning range of BigCommerce themes. You will also enjoy stellar BigCommerce support, you’ll also enjoy an average response time of just 1/3 of a second.

There are many great functional, responsive features, and modern BigCommerce templates to choose from. If you want to optimize your page, choose a theme that allows you to display photographs in a way that does not impact the performance of your site. Use JPG files over PNG format. They can be compressed to a much smaller size with no loss of quality.

For maximum speed, you should also choose a BigCommerce theme. It is responsive as it shrinks photographs and other images according to the size of the screen being used to access your site. The increased number of customers doing all their online shopping from mobile devices, having a site that is as blisteringly fast from a mobile phone as it is from a desktop is crucial.
If your business is without an effective website, your brand’s revenue is sure to feel the impact. For your business to be a success, you need a website that performs well. Having a speedy service appealing to the needs of their customers is sure to improve revenue and your brand’s reputation.

We at Blackbelt Commerce in partnership with BigCommerce can help you implement a fast, robust, functional, and great looking website.  We also invite you to check out our other services, and additional great Blogs articles.  If you would like to contact us please click here or visit us here to learn more about us.