During the process of designing a website for your online business, you may be tempted to implement all of the newest design features, but keep in mind that these additions can dramatically reduce the load time and overall speed of your website. Remember, visitors are a lot more concerned with getting onto your site quickly and browsing it for what they need, so they don’t really care about the extras.

How exactly does your website speed affect your bottom line?

Slower Load Time = Faster Page Abandonment

Look around. People today don’t have patience. Customers hustle through stores, checking their mobile devices as they go so they can juggle multiple tasks at the same time. And when they’re online, your customers don’t want to waste any precious seconds waiting for a website to load. In fact, the longer they need to wait for a website to open, the more likely it is that they’ll abandon the page and move on from it altogether.

To put it into perspective, page abandonment goes up by 25% when a website takes a mere 4 seconds to load. And, as you would imagine, the longer a page takes to open, the higher that abandonment percentage gets. In other words, your website needs to load in a second or two, at most, to retain the most visitors possible.

Mobile Surfers and Page Abandonment

Those who surf the Internet on their mobile devices want the same speed that they’d be able to enjoy on their computers, so it’s imperative that you design a website that’s highly compatible with mobile devices, including phones and tablets.

Although many mobile users expect that sites will load more slowly on their devices as opposed to on their computers, this doesn’t mean that they won’t abandon a page that’s taking a long time to load or that’s giving them problems. Most users will wait, on average, anywhere from 6 to 10 seconds before abandoning a page on their devices.

Things to Consider When Designing Your Website

It’s important to keep in mind that even just a one second delay in load time can lead to profit losses. If you think about how much money you earn every day and how many customers you can lose if your page loads too slowly, you can calculate just how much money you’ll lose over the course of a year. So, are you ready to design a website that’ll retain customers for longer and lead to increased sales?

First, make sure your website is able to load up in 2 seconds or less. Then check that your website doesn’t freeze, crash, or encounter other issues that would drive customers away both on their mobile devices as well as on their computers. Do so by testing your website regularly on a variety of different devices. And when it comes to developing your site and making it compatible on mobile browsers, be sure you format it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and simple to read. These steps will ensure customers will stay on your site longer and make more purchases.