Why People are Throwing Their Phones: How Slow Load Times Could Be Impacting Your Business

Did you ever get so frustrated with your phone that you just had to chuck it across the room? Maybe you’re trying to show your friend a funny article, or just trying to figure out where the nearest gas station is. All you want is to do this one thing, but the f&#%ing page won’t load! It’s almost a cruel joke– we have all this information right at our fingertips, but we have to wait what feels like an eternity to access it.

Trust me, we’ve all been there. Not only is this a frustrating problem for consumers, it’s also a big issue for businesses. If your mobile website has a slow load time, it can have a negative impact on the amount of business you get from mobile consumers. But if it takes more than a few millennials whining about it to convince you that this is something you should be paying attention to, here are a few stats to bolster my claim.

Over 50% of customers will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

That’s potentially half of your customers that will leave your website before they even get to it. Needless to say, those people won’t be purchasing or converting on your website if it doesn’t open. Plus, that bad experience that they had will come back to haunt you–

1/5 dissatisfied users will never return to a website after a bad load time experience.

So not only are you losing a potential purchase due to a bad load time experience, you may have lost a customer as well. Also, having a speedy mobile site will help with your Google search rankings. Google has stated that it will begin favoring websites with faster load times to keep consumers happy.

Google has stated that over 70% of websites out there have load times of more than 7 seconds, well over the 3-second benchmark. The first step to fixing a slow site is knowing that the site is slow, and the good news is that you can test your website to see if you fall in that 70%. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to get a page speed score, information, and tips on how to improve the speed of your site.

You may be sitting there thinking, “I know I have a slow website, but what else can I do to fix it?” Well, (and here comes the shameless plug) our team at Burlington Bytes can handle the complicated part of speeding up your current website, or even make you a brand new one! Our expertise will help you to be competitive in the ever-expanding mobile market.