Want more conversions? Try more speed…

As ecommerce sites begin to proliferate and small business ramps up their offerings at their websites, speed, it seems, has become a huge factor. Some recent research has revealed that slow loading sites, as well as those that are confusing to navigate, actually lose half of the ecommerce business they may have been able to garner. Today’s online consumer, it appears, will not tolerate slow loading websites or those that aren’t geared toward making an immediate sale.

•  You, basically, have less than three seconds these days to make an impression. In the instant gratification era we are engulfed in, research everywhere continues to suggest that if your home page is taking longer than three seconds to fully load, you have lost the chance at a sale. Most online ecommerce shoppers will give you three seconds and then they will click off to somewhere else. Perhaps to a competitor whose load time is around two seconds?
• It is estimated that around three billion dollars in revenue is lost every year due to consumers who are not willing to wait longer than three seconds to get what they came for.
• The really great news is, however, that for every second you get faster, you will likely boost your conversion rate by at least ten percent.
• One of the most depressing research stats related to ecommerce has to be that 70% of all shoppers end up abandoning their shopping carts before making a purchase. This can be related to all manner of things but the major culprits are speed, an absence of easy navigation, and not feeling they can trust you.
• Most ecommerce and small business sites don’t even bother to test their pages for load time. They think all of the fancy graphics and movement will simply delight those that visit. The painful truth is people, especially shoppers, want speed, convenience, and ease of navigation. All of your fancy graphics and sliding messages are just slowing down your load times and costing you money.
• Boost your conversions by keeping your site clean and responsive. Get your load time to around three seconds and remove any and all obstacles that will prevent your customer from taking that deftly constructed step by step road to buying whatever it is you happen to be selling.