The easy answer to “how long will your customers wait for slow web hosting?” is not as long as you think. If poor web hosting has led to slow page load times for your customers, you’re losing them and your profits, it really is that simple.
According to most studies, customers expect a website to load in under 2 seconds, and if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, then a massive 40% will simply abandon their shopping carts! Those statistics can translate into massive revenue loss if you have a slow website.
It’s no wonder that webmasters are prioritizing speed these days, and one easy way to ensure you have a solid foundation for your website to work from is with solid hosting. You can be doing everything right, but if your web host is slowing you down, then your visitors are going to leave.
Speed Competition
Google notes that people won’t visit a website as often, or at all, if it’s slower than the competition. Just how much slower? The research shows that a difference of 250 milliseconds is enough to make users move on to another site. One computer scientist at Microsoft, Harry Shum, has noted that “two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the web.” Unfortunately, many site owners don’t even realize that they’re putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage from the outset.
What your users expect are above and beyond what you can imagine, even if they don’t know it consciously. Plus, some people are also more willing to wait for certain things as opposed to others. For example, people are more patient waiting for a video than a web search. They think that a video naturally takes longer to load and are also probably more interested in seeing that specific clip.
Rich Experience vs Speed
In the battle between the richness of a website and the speed, it’s neck and neck. Web designers know they need to make attractive and rich websites that people want to visit and use. But a better looking website can slow down the speed. This is especially true with media outlets such as The Huffington Post or even BuzzFeed, where interactive graphs and videos are par for the course.
Google has stated that 80% of users will happily click away from a video if it takes “too long to load”. Demands are high with mobile phones nowadays too, which is a crucial aspect in a mobile first world. Backlinko estimates that the average web page takes 10.3 seconds to load on a desktop, while it takes 27.3 seconds on a mobile. If you can get significantly under those numbers, that is a good start.
Powerful Smartphones
The internet is more or less mobile first now and you need to be building websites with a “mobile first” mindset. If you website loads slowly on mobiles, for whatever reason, there is no excuse. Many mobile phones of today are more powerful than low-end computers from a few years ago, so excusing or blaming a slow website on poor devices isn’t going to cut it.
