Speed Up Your Site for High Customer Satisfaction

As you know, when you’re running an ecommerce business, customer satisfaction is key! If the customer isn’t happy, no one is—least of all you. With this in mind, what should you make your priority? If we could assemble 100 seasoned online shoppers and take a quick survey of what turns them off most about a purchasing experience, we’d bet a lot of money that one of the top three complaints would be slow web site speed. Ignoring the rate at which your page loads is bad for business in numerous ways—two of which are the fact that it irritates customers and Google’s clear preference for sites that load quickly. If you don’t want your sales, satisfaction levels, and SEO performance to suffer, you’ll want to make sure you employ web design best practices to keep your web site moving efficiently. Let’s take a better look at some of the basics of what lagging load times can mean for your business—and what you can do to improve them.

Check Out These Real-World Examples

Smriti Chalwa’s recent article for the site Six Revisions compiles six illustrative case studies on the importance of web site speed. One of them centers on ecommerce giant Amazon, which could lose an estimated $745 million in revenue if its site were to load just 100 milliseconds less quickly. Slow loading times led to decreased sales, page views, and number of clicks, lower customer satisfaction, and greater abandonment. It’s not hard to understand why, either—if you were trying to make a quick and easy online purchase and couldn’t locate products or complete the checkout process in a timely fashion, would you keep plugging away at it or surf to a competitor’s web site and give them your business instead? If your web site design is such that your own customers are becoming frustrated by long waits, you may be doing your business an enormous disservice—and you’ll want to remedy that right away for much better results. When Shopzilla improved its site speed, for example, page views increased by 25%!

Get Things on Your Site Moving Today!

So, if your load times are lagging, the bad news is that they are very likely hurting your bottom line. But the good news is that you can make some web design changes right away that will improve the speed of your site. For example, it’s not difficult to check out all the banners and graphics on your page to make sure they’re saved in the most appropriate formats so that they don’t take forever to display. You can also minimize your use of certain programming languages, like CSS and JavaScript, to keep things more streamlined. And while you’re making updates like these, don’t forget to design responsively, as your site should run beautifully on mobile phones and tablets as well as traditional desktop and laptop computers.

Rapid load time is one result of your web design strategy that you truly can’t afford to gloss over. Your conversion rates are dependent on it. If you suspect you’re the owner of a slowpoke site, it’s important to get it up to speed today.

 

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  • By Dennis Consorte
  • Published on April 8th, 2014