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In the 21st century, few things are more important than your brand. This is true whether you're a single-person operation or a large-scale organization. It's true even if you have nothing to sell. Your brand is how people perceive you.
So after working tirelessly at getting every angle right, the last thing you want is for a technical issue like speed to derail your efforts. As you'll soon find out, the speed with which your website loads can help or hurt your brand—in more ways than one.
In fact, today we're going to cover the three primary ways in which the dreaded “loading” icon could be hurting your bottom line.
1. Wasted Opportunities
The digital world moves at the speed of light. People want everything at their fingertips, and they want it all to match the speed of their finger swipes across the screen. Fail to measure up to that standard, and you'll end up wasting more opportunities than you'd like to count.
We're talking about lost leads, lost sales, and lost revenue. Your marketing funnel will be blasted from every angle if your website is painfully slow. That's because anything over 2 seconds of loading time will leave the users itching to hit the back button.
In fact, some experts estimate that 47% of users expect a website to load within 2 seconds. Anything over that and you risk losing them forever.
2. Reputation Hit
Your website is your brand's digital storefront. Whether you're a blogger or an e-commerce vendor, odds are that your website is the primary way your audience interacts with your brand.
To put that into more practical terms, your audience's perception of your brand and your competence will—for better or for worse—be judged by the quality of your website, and speed is a big part of the experience.
3. SEO Damage
Organic marketing is the beating heart of most small-to-medium businesses. With most social media platforms limiting the organic reach to record lows in a bid to boost their ad sales, SEO is the only logical option for many brands.
Unfortunately, your SEO strategy could fall short of expectations if your website takes too long to load. Google, the most popular search engine on the planet, has categorically stated that speed is one of the factors they consider when ranking a website.
While speed alone won't help you secure the coveted first-page rankings, it most certainly will uplift your website's appeal in the eyes of search engines.
Closing Thoughts
The loading time of your website matters for many reasons. To help you supercharge the performance of your website, you can check our detailed guide on WordPress performance optimization.
While many factors contribute to how quickly your website loads and reacts to user input, your choice of hosting service is one of the most important considerations. The right host can immediately slash crucial seconds off of your loading time.
To see why customers love the blazing-fast speed of WinkHosting, be sure to check our hosting plans and take our service for a spin. We take pride in the performance of all our solutions.
