How to Speed Up Your Site and Make More Money

Do you have a fast website? If you do, you are probably racing past your competition in the search rankings. If you don’t have a fast website or blog… you are probably missing out and leaving a ton of money on the table in the process! Even worse… you are likely losing a lot of site visitors and maybe even damaging your brand in the process.

The truth is, a fast loading website is one of the most important things you can focus on. However, it’s also something that many people simply don’t focus on enough. This is usually because the loading time of your site is often something that site owners don’t know how to fix or improve, but also it’s not something that is really shown in monthly revenue reports — but it definitely has an effect on your bottom line!

The good news is that there are plenty of free tools, resources and guides out there to help with increase the speed of your site, while also lowering hosting and server resources as well. My good friend Syed Balkhi has a great resource on speeding up WordPress, that is a must-read for anyone using WP to power their site.

With all of that being said, today we are going to take a look at an infographic from WebpageFX that shows why a faster website is so important, and how it can affect how much money your site makes in the process.

Why Faster Websites Make More Money

What happened the last time you visit a website and it took more than a second or two to load? Like most of us, you probably left the site. No only did you leave the site… it also left a bad taste in your most and you might have never even visit the site again. This in itself is a huge cost to any website (especially an e-commerce)!

Let’s now take a look at some key stats on why faster websites simply make more money and perform so much better.

• 83% of users expect websites to load in 3 seconds or less
• The median loading time of the top 500 e-commerce home pages is 10 seconds

When it comes to the behavior of online shoppers, here’s what they had to say.

• 44% are more likely to develop a more negative perception of the company
• 79% are less likely to buy from the site again
• 46% would actively tell their friends and family about the experience

Based off these numbers and responses, a slow loading site can really cause some damage to how your site and brand looks to your general audience. However, a slow pagespeed can also negatively affect other areas of your site as well.

• User Experience: No one likes a slow loading web site.
• Pageviews: The longer a site takes to load, the less your audience will stick around.
• SEO: Google wants to rank fast loading web sites higher.
• Conversion: Faster loading content and lead-gen forms result in higher lead generation.

Be sure to consider the speed of your site when trying to rank in the search results. To help with this process, be sure to check out these SEO analyzer tools. Each of them are free to use, and will also allow you to check out the speed and SEO rankings of your competition as well. Not only is this a great resource, but it’s also a good way to keep an eye on your competition and seeing how fast their sites load.

The Importance of a Single Second in Load Time

It’s easy to say a fast loading web site is important, but once you have some numbers to back it up… then you can really get an idea of how important it is. Reports show that a 1-second improvement in loading time can result in over a 7% increase in conversions. This adds up to a lot of money over time.

On the internet, everything needs to be looked at in seconds, minutes, days, months and years. Since most online sites and businesses are getting traffic and sales 24/7, having a slow loading website or downtime of just 0.003% is still being down for a whole day of the year! Imagine how much that would cost your business vs. the extremely small cost of fixing something so simple.

The longer your site takes to load, the more money you are missing out on.

The infographic chart below breaks this down extremely well.

• If you have a site that makes $100 per day, a 1-second difference can cost $2,555 per year.
• If that same site makes $1,000 a day and still has a 1-second delay, it would be $25,550 lost per year!

If you can also play these numbers on the reverse and see how much more money your site could be making if it was simply loading 1, 2 or 3 seconds faster.

• A site generating $100,000 per day would make $7,000 more per day with a 1-second improvement
• The same site would see a $426,000 improvement over the course of a month with a 2-second improvement
• It starts to get crazy when you scale it out to a year and do a 3-second improvement, which is over $7 million

Again… it’s all a numbers game and no matter how big or small your site or revenue numbers might be, the importance of a fast loading site is extremely important.

Real-Life Examples of How Important Site Speed Is

It’s kind of crazy to think about a website that could be doing $100,000 a day in sales or revenue… but there are plenty of them. Amazon and Walmart do those types of numbers every minute of the day — and sometimes in second on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

• Amazon and Walmart both reported a 1% LOSS in revenue per 100ms of site load delay
• Walmart INCREASED conversions by 2% for every 1 second of load time improvement
• Intuit was able to increase conversions by more than 3% after shaving 7 seconds off their load time
• Obama Fundraising Campaign increased donation conversions by 14% by decreasing page speed from 5 seconds to 2 seconds — which resulted in $34 million in contributions
• Mozilla improved conversions by 15.4% by shaving 2.2 seconds off their loading time — which resulted in 60+ million additional downloads per year

How much of an impact could a single second in loading time be costing your business?

How to Improve the Speed of Your Website

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, there are plenty of ways to increase to loading time and pagespeed of your site. Some of the most simple ways to accomplish this is to use a content delivery network, reduce the file size of images and content on your site, and also use WordPress as your CMS — as many plugins, tools, and outside solutions can help with this as well.

There are also different web hosting plans and platforms you should use and stay away from as well.

For example, if you have a website that is making you some serious money… why are you still using shared hosting and using a server that thousands of other sites are hosted on? Other options include investing in a dedicated server or a web host that specializes in fast-powered web hosting.

One low-cost (yet effective) solution is A2 Hosting, which provides “Turbo” speed hosting, which claims to increase site speed by up to 20 times. This is done by adding more resources to each server while having fewer users. Sites are also pre-configured with site caching and more virtual memory.

To further back up and compliment these statements from A2 Hosting on their “Turbo” solution, we can look at the uptime percentage and response time from the chart below. This report is from HostingFacts.com and their reviews on cheap hosting providers. When stacked up against the competition, A2 Hosting was ranked #1 for speed, over top web hosting solutions like SiteGround, BlueHost, and DreamHost.

To learn more about A2 Hosting and their premium “Turbo” hosting, simply click the image below.

With Google now putting more weight on sites that are fast loading, and audiences now having a shorter attention span than ever before, it’s important to step up your site loading game. There is no reason for your site to be loading any more than 2-3 seconds. Any more than that and you are just killing your site potential and how much it could be earning.

Follow these tips and recommendations to improve your site’s loading time, while also making some extra money in the process.