Go ahead and admit it – you hate slow websites. Everyone does. So it’s safe to assume that if you have a slow-loading site, you can expect people to hate it, too. But why exactly do we get impatient and hate slow sites?
People used to wait patiently for web pages to load. When the Internet was still new websites took forever to load and no one complained. They were just excited to have the technology that Internet afforded. However now if people have to wait more than a second or two for a website to load, they click away. And no one wants that!
Here are some reasons why you and everyone else hates landing on slow websites:
- Waste of Valuable Time – Every person’s time is valuable and precious. Every second waiting for a page to load is time wasted. Everyone wants to make the most of their time so when someone encounters a slow site, it feels like the site owner is not respecting their time.
- Bad User Experience – A slow site leaves a bad taste in your customer’s mouth. People click on your link because they want to go check out your content, but since your site is taking forever to load, they’re not going to want to stick around.They wouldn’t even want to come back for a second visit. This means you just lost a customer, a potential repeat customers.
- Too Many Choices – As of January 2019 there were over 1.94 billion websites on the Internet. If one site is too slow people will just head over to the next one. Why wait when a must faster website offers the same information. It may seem like we’ve all become entitled to getting our way, but this is the sad truth. We’ve become spoiled by the sheer number of choices we have and the speed by which we can access those choices.
If you think your website is running slow there are multiple free services that will test for you. Take some time (or outsource it) to review your website speed and make sure you are not losing customers but wasting their time or giving them a bad user experience.