The Devastating Cost Of Poor Website Performance
This article from Wade Harman looks at the effects that poor website performance may have on your company’s bottom line. It’s certainly cautionary reading, and is another in our “Great Articles You may have missed” series.
Poor Website Performance Has A Cost!
In the past few years, consumer trends have shifted in favor of online shopping.
E-commerce is growing faster than their brick-and- mortar counterparts. This shift has changed how we conduct business forever.
At the click of a button, a consumer can buy a product.
At same moment, the retailer gets his or her money.
But despite the positive aspects of e-commerce, retailers face new and unforeseen challenges. Take Amazon.com for example. A mere 100 milliseconds of downtime costs the company 1% in sales. A five-second delay in page generation costs Google 20% in traffic.
It is now obvious that poor website performance ultimately affects your profits, and here’s how.
1. Lost Customers
According to experts, most people leave a website if it takes more than a second or two to load. At six seconds, 9 out 10 potential customers abandon their shopping carts. The fast-paced world we live in penalizes any delays. Customers expect lightning-fast page-load time.
So, if you are a retailer, slow loading times can spell doom for your business, and a boom for your competition: provided that their websites are faster than yours. In the world of ecommerce, speed is king, and to get it, retailers are turning to fast web hosting providers like certa hosting.
2. Crashing Websites
An e-commerce website must be able to handle any number of visitors, particularly during peak times such as the holiday season. So, if your website lacks scalability, it is only a matter of time before you pay for it in customers and, ultimately, in profits.
When customers flood it with requests, it crashes. And when this happens, they bolt.
Research into the effect of a crashed retail website can attest to this. Researchers have found that a momentary crash is all it takes to lose your customer base to your rivals. Thus, to stay ahead in the industry, a website that can handle many visitors at once is a must.
Every time your competition loses customers, they come to you.
3. Loss of Customer Loyalty
The greatest tragedy of having a website that performs poorly is not the loss of a customer.
Although that is bad enough in itself, it does not compare to the loss of a loyal customer. E-commerce works on the principle of repeat customers. They not only mean steady business, they refer other customers to you. So losing even one has an effect on your bottom line for months -maybe even years – to come.
4. Going Out of Business
A website that fails to keep up with demand, sends customers away and compromises marketing campaigns, can eventually run you out of business.
It is sad to think that failing to invest in something as simple as a well-designed website and fast hosting services can lead to this.
As the facts above clearly show, poor website performance can actually affect your bottom line. At some point, you cannot even conduct a marketing campaign effectively and your bottom line drops.
Ultimately, you close shop.
We’d Love To Hear Your Thoughts!
Curatti Note: We all get frustrated by poor response times, but do 90% of people really click off a page after 6 seconds without a response? Even if it happens once? I guess that would put me in the 10%! What are your thoughts on this? At what point do you click off? Do you cut more slack to people you’ve been a regular customer of? I do. But I’m a Boomer. Might that be generational? Sorry for all of the questions, but I’m genuinely interested.
Wade Harman
This article was originally titled “How Poor Website Performance Ultimately Affects Your Profits” and was published on wadeharman.com and is republished here with permission.
Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_wittaya123‘ / 123RF Stock Photo
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