6 Reasons Slow Load Times Could Harm Your Website

Have you ever abandoned a site just because it took too long to load?

Poor load times can have a big negative effect on customer conversion, and there's growing evidence that it can harm your performance in the search engines. So, here are six reasons why you should speed up your site (or wave goodbye to your customers):

It can affect your search engine rankings

At the end of 2009, Google announced that site load times will be a ranking factor in 2010. Although many in the search engine optimisation field have long speculated that speed could be related to rankings, this was the first time it came straight from a Google source.

What this means for your site is:

If your pages are slow to load, then they may rank lower in the natural search results in Google. For every position you drop in the rankings, the less people you attract to your site and (generally) the less sales you make. By the time you get pushed onto the second page of Google, you can expect traffic to decrease by as much as 70%.


It makes sense, therefore, to do everything you can to stay high up the rankings. Including working on your site speed.

It could send your visitors to your competitors

A December '09 study of 1500 customers by the web optimisation firm Gomez found that 78% of site visitors left for a competitor site if pages were slow to load.

In particular, sectors such as e-banking, ecommerce and price comparison sites suffer if they're slow loading. People just don't have the patience to wait in an online world of abundant alternatives.

It could mean your visitors don't come back

The same Gomez study found that 88% of respondents would be reluctant to visit a site again if they experienced poor loading times.

So, poor speed might not just affect you now – but in future as previous visitors remember their unhappy experience.


Visitors will spend less time on your site

Less time on your site means less opportunity to convert a visitor into a customer. It means less time engaging with your content (and your brand).

It also means that visitors are more likely to leave before a goal is completed, whether that's buying a product or subscribing to a newsletter.

It makes your site appear less professional

If visitors perceive your site as unprofessional, then their trust level plummets. Of course that can have big consequences on whether a customer is likely to buy a product or service from you. Would you trust a site that took ages to load with your credit card details?

It can decrease your conversions

All of the above comes down to one key factor – harming conversions. If your site loads slow, then you could be missing out on customers. It's that simple.

If you're annoying your visitors, or giving them reasons to doubt the reliability of your site, that's never a good thing. Add to that the possibility of ranking higher in the search engines with a faster site, and the case for improving your load times is overwhelming.

After all, nobody ever abandoned a site because it was “too fast”.