Optimizing Website Speed can Increase Consumer Traffic

So  you’ve worked hard to cast your hooks into the social web and you’ve optimized your site for search engines.  The result should be a growth in website traffic, which is your long-term goal.  And rightly so, for in the online marketplace, website traffic is virtual currency and you should attempt to build and maintain as high a level as is sustainable.  But, have you stopped to consider the role user connection speed plays in your efforts to build traffic?

Speed is, it turns out, a key factor in retaining incoming traffic.  The internet has made consumers impatient and the longer they have to wait to see your content, the less likely they’ll stick around to view it.  An analysis conducted by Google VP Marissa Mayer brings this point to fruition:

Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results [from ten] to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.

Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

To underscore the point, an increase in the site’s load time of half a second resulted in a 20% decrease in the site’s traffic.  So with the importance of speed now on our minds, please allow me to suggest a few actions you can take to minimize what we might refer to as “impatient traffic loss,” which includes benchmarking your site and optimizing your webserver and online media.

read more

February 5, 2009 | Filed Under small business | Comments