The Cost of Having a Slow Website (and how to fix it)

Slow websites are costing local business owners tens of thousands in sales.

Where does this “loss of revenue” come from?

When people visit your site, it’s usually to consume something (read, watch etc.) or to book a service. Usually, readers eventually book an appointment.

But, if your website is slow, most people will simply leave before it loads.

When someone leaves before a website loads, this is called a website bounce.

Google did research on page load speed and people who bounce:

The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds – Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.

This basically means that for every extra second your website takes to load you are losing 16% of your readership and potential customers.

YIKES!

Before I show you how to fix this, it’s worth understanding the mind of a person browsing the internet (without realising, you most likely browse the internet like this too!)

The internal conversation we have in our heads when we are browsing sounds like this:

If this website is going to take more than half a second to load, I’d rather just look for another website.

Nobody will wait. No matter how outstanding your content or services are.

So let’s fix this.

At The Backend Engineer, we try to do three main things to keep our websites blazing fast.

Remove all the junk code from a website

In the world, there are three different types of websites:

A static website is simply a website that has the same information for every user that comes to your website.

Most local businesses only need a static website. Chances are, you have one of these.

The thing is… even if you have a static marketing website (which generates lots of business), it’s still static, and if it is static it means the coding part is simple.

Yet, people use massive website builders like WordPress and Squarespace. These website builds have an insane amount of code that make your website very slow.

When we build marketing websites we write the absolute minimum amount of static code. Because the focus of the website is the _ Lead Gen Vitals_, the LGV is what generates the leads, and that has nothing to do with the code.

In short, less code + LGV = blazing fast website.

Lead Gen Vitals

The crown jewel of what we do for our clients is the Lead Gen Vitals.

This is a long list of behind the scenes (and on page) activities that we do to make sure a website becomes a marketing website.

Part of this list is called “make the site stupid fast” (yes, I seriously named it that…).

But… what is fast?

Google can help us here. We can test a website for speed using Google’s page speed insights. Our goal is to go for 100 here.

So my exceptional team and I work through the Lead Gen Vital list to make sure we hit that 100 mark.

As a result of these two things (removing junk code, and LGV), we help websites retain almost 75% of their website visitors.

£20,000 in Annual Value

Can we do some math before we end?

If an engaged website visitor is worth £2,000 per year to your company, and on average 30% of your readers become engaged visitors, then by increasing visitors that stay from 40% to 75%…

(Stick with me…)

This means that for every 100 visitors, you will create 10 MORE engaged visitors.

We just said that an engaged visitor is worth £2,000 per year.

That means that if you have a blazing fast marketing site, for every 100 website visitors, you would increase the value of your website by £20,000 in annual value.

Of course, these numbers will be dependent on different factors like the annual value of a new customer, and how often people buy etc.

More importantly, these numbers reflect the fact that you have a marketing website, as opposed to a “normal” website.

Normal websites do not generate leads effectively.

Change that.