How Site Speed Impacts Your Local Businesses?

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Have you ever spent more than three seconds on a website while it was still loading? 

Almost all of you would answer no.

Why? 

Because, as readers and visitors to a website, we all want it to be fast and responsive so that we can navigate more quickly. 

If you didn't realize it before, the performance of your website could affect and cost your business. A website that loads quickly is regarded as the best and has a positive reputation online and in the market. 

On the other, even if you've done all of your SEO and your website is slow, there's a strong chance you'll lose business, and even people who would want to come and see you would not check your page or products.

How Site Speed Impact Your Local Businesses

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1. A Change In Customer Behavior

When a web page loads slowly, it directly impacts customer behavior. When a page loads slowly, it tests users' patience, negatively impacting their online experience with your brand.
Around 70% of customers feel that page speed significantly impacts their company perception. It has an impact on their purchasing decision.

• Always keep a tab on your page speed using tools like Pingdom and Google Chrome's Inspect Element.

• GTmetrix performance report also helps you determine your page speed using a simple waterfall report where you could click each element to know what can be improved. Take a look at this example:

• Google's Page Speed tool is perfect for determining what is slowing down your local business website and providing suggestions on the key improvement areas.

2. Tampers With The User Experience

There's no use in designing a highly engaging and visually appealing website if visitors can't enjoy it because the site isn't fast enough. A website with effective interactions must load when visitors attempt to utilize it.
Customers that come online to search are thought to have an extremely short attention span, perhaps a few seconds or less.
When you aim to attract more clients through the user interface, you should also be prepared to provide them with the finest user experience possible, which is only possible with a good website and page speed.
If this is not the case, your clients will likely leave your site and hunt for alternatives.

• Use a CDN to load your website interactions faster. This means a lesser wait time for the customers, which results in a better user experience. Here’s how the web pages reach an audience with and without CDN. 

• CDNs like Fastly, Akamai, Cloudflare CDN provide quick and secure content for your users.
• A slower website could also be because of high-resolution images. Optimize it with tools like JPEG optimizer, Tiny PNG, OR Ezgif.
• Links are also an important factor when it comes to website speed. Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Ahrefs to locate and fix your broken links.

Read: The Role of UX in Local SEO

3. Impacts Your SEO Ranking

Google does not favor slow websites listed higher in the search engine. So, no matter how fantastic your content is, you could lose your search engine ranking if your website isn't fast enough. 

For businesses to gain more visitors to their websites, their search engine ranking is crucial.
However, if your website is slow, Google will rank other faster websites and have a shorter load time. This may be one of your competitors', in which case you're falling behind.

• Enable caching so some of the common elements across your website load faster and quicker. 

• Lazy load your pages. This means only those images and content gets loaded that are currently viewed by the user and not the ones that are further down the pages. Take a look at this screenshot to show how it increases website speed. 

• Use Screaming Frog to find the broken links, XML Sitemaps, HTML, duplicate content, and analyze titles and descriptions.

4. Drops Your Conversion Rate

Bidnamic says that conversion rate is impacted directly by website speed. This means that the slower your website loads, the lower your conversion rate. 

For example, a website that loads in seven seconds is said to have a conversion rate of only 1.5 percent, whereas a website that loads in three seconds has a conversion rate of 2.55 percent. Here’s the proportion of site speed to conversion rate. 

Furthermore, users are less likely to consider your site for future purchases if it takes too long for them to load, especially on mobile phones. 

• Enable compression for better and faster load time. Use GIDNetwork to run the compression audit, which spots the uncompressed files on your page. Use GZip to compress them. 

• Adding an index to your website pages is one of the most important optimizations you can do to improve your page speed.

5. Increases Your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is when a visitor comes to your website and leaves without taking any action or activity. A visitor will not want to wait more than three seconds for the page to load for site performance.
People may abandon exploring other sites and leave your website if it takes too long. Higher bounce rates occur when a large number of users abandon your website because it is unusable, even before reading the content, due to page speed.
This has a significant impact on your engagement and, as a result, on your entire sales.

• Hotjar enables you to identify and learn visitor interactions. It uses behavioral analytics software to collect feedback. It lets you know which part of your site makes the users bounce off by showing user flow. 

• Google's Search Console is another tool you can use to determine the right keywords and other SEO metrics to optimize for better page speed.

6. Lost Trust And Reputation

Customers are more inclined to recommend your business to others if they had a positive user experience while engaging with it. 

For example, if a local consumer in your neighborhood notices your business, they will want to learn more because it is a local firm that they feel they can contact at any time. 

Take a look at the below screenshot of a clothing store. If the users want to check out products before visiting but witness these non-loading pages, it’ll hamper the brand. 

However, when they search the internet and discover your website is taking forever to load, it bursts their bubble, and they will have no interest in visiting your store. 

This also implies they may not recommend your brand to other local clients, and they may even advise them not to choose yours over your competition. This might have a bad reputation on your local business.

• Wave is a tool that determines your website accessibility. You can find missing alt text or errors that make the content difficult to read.

• Use tools like Mobile-Friendly Test, WebPage Test, and Hotjar to determine your website's mobile optimization.

7. Loss Of Website Traffic

When your website is slow, it impacts your search engine ranking. From the customer's perspective, a slow website is a poor sign.
When you put yourself in their shoes, why would a buyer want to wait for your website to load when so many other websites offer the same product with a better user experience?
Websites that rank in the first few pages of a search engine receive the most traffic. To prove it, Backlinko analyzed 5 million search results and concluded that 1st-page results receive maximum traffic. 

• To know your customers' real-time user interaction with your website, use the session recording software to understand your customers for real.

• Another best way to improve your website is by understanding it from customers. Ask for feedback and surveys to improve your local business website.

Key Takeaways

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• User experience and bounce rate are directly affected by site speed.
• Perform a website speed test to figure out what's going wrong.
• CDNs can speed up your pages, the website's interactions, and other elements.
• Your website can be faster to use if you enable browser caching.
• Utilize screen recordings to gain better insight into real-user behavior.
• Make your images load faster by optimizing them.
• Your pages will load faster if you index them.
• Faster websites provide better user experience, conversions, credibility, and scalability.