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Time is Money: Beating the Clock and Understanding Your Visitors
As resident experts in web development Surrey, the team at Thunderbolt know a lot about the ‘behind the scenes’ nature of websites and how even very small changes can affect things in a big way – like page load speed. We know that SMEs like to focus on having a good-looking, functional website, but it’s easy to get caught up in things and forget about one of the vital elements like loading speed. How quickly your page loads can make all the difference, especially in the modern fast-paced world, but in case you don’t believe us, here are some key times for web visitors, and how they affect how people interact with your site.
Gone in Sixty Seconds
What can happen in a minute? Well, a lot more than you’d think – especially when it comes to business websites! Studies have revealed that users expect web pages to load within two seconds and that many visitors will leave if a site takes more than three seconds to load – numbers for this vary but the amount of people who will abandon slow pages seem to be between 40-60%. In fact, improving your site load speed by just one second can see an increase in conversion rates by 7%, 11% more page views, and even an improvement of 16% regarding customer satisfaction – all from just one second!
Now, once your page has loaded (quickly, we hope!), you have a mere 4 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention, and, after 10 seconds, the average person will have decided if they want to stick around on your site or not (the ‘nots’ will all increase your bounce rate, so watch out!).
Whew – so 13 seconds after clicking on your site, crunch time’s already happened and a potential customer has made a decision about your business – that must be it, right? Not quite! Despite the fast paced world we live in and ever shorter attention spans, not everyone has made up their minds by 10 seconds, so that’s where the 30 second mark comes in – once a user has been on your site for this long, they’re much more likely to continue exploring your site, and bounce rates around this time frame are very low.
So what next? An important thing to remember is that the general user only has around 15 minutes to spare for a website once they’re decided to stay on your site, so make sure that they can find what they need to in that time! It’s essential that you site possesses good design, navigation, UX and user journey – make things as simple and quick for users as you can, and they’re bound to stick around!