What are the disadvantages of a slow website?

A website is not just a digital marketing tool anymore. It plays a pivotal role in the digital transformation of a business in this growing digital era. A website has a wider reach than any other type of media and greatly facilitates the expansion of your business way beyond geographic proximities. The website obviously becomes the backbone of your online presence and allows you to showcase your business’ credibility. Let it be publishing any type of communication or a piece of content or an advertisement, the site definitely delivers a realistic experience to the customers.

Even though a site has the perfect design, intuitive navigation with clear call-to-action, the most important factor that should never be underestimated is the load time.

A slow website substantially impacts the revenue of your business – direct as well as opportunity perspective. The loading speed of a website is affected by several factors like the selection of an improper host, usage of very large images, external embedded media, unoptimized browser, plugins and apps, too many ads, heavy themes, widgets and lastly double-barrelled code.

Disadvantages of a slow website

1. Drop off in traffic: For any business to become successful, proper management of the website traffic is very important. Greater the number of visitors, higher is the opportunity to make the product well known among users and ultimately higher is the probability to sell your product. Poor management or a sudden drop in the website traffic leads to a drastic fall in the business revenue. Every second count when it comes to conversions. In the busy life of today, the primary key is to determine the right balance between quality and time, and at most times users prefer timely service over quality. Online giants like Amazon have reported that a delay of just a fraction of a second resulted in a drop of 1% of their conversion sales. Each such drop off is an opportunity lost.

2. Loss of money:A website serves as the frontier for the growth of any organization. Let it be marketing the product or collecting feedback from users, websites have grown leaps and bounds in all these areas and they provide a better experience and service to their customers. Designing and development of a website that fascinates the user is no mean task. Continuous maintenance and enhancement of the website according to the growth in business is also a mandate. Selection of the right web service provider is very crucial and a minor slip in this process leads to a huge financial loss. Only a reliable and reputed web service provider can ensure to maintain the website always accessible, safe, and highly efficient in terms of loading speed.

3. Negative impact on SEO:Page speed indicates how quickly the contents load on a website. Page loading speed is one of the key factors used by Google algorithms to rank the pages. If the loading speed of your website is slow, the search engines crawl only fewer pages and this severely affects your indexation. So the entire effort and money invested in developing an attractive website with captivating content go futile if the loading speed is slow. A slow website is heavily penalized by the search engines which ultimately lead to a huge loss of revenue.

4. A bad user experience: A slow website creates a bad user experience. A slow website just makes any user lose his confidence when he first visits the website. It just creates uncertainty and a feeling of uneasiness on the product and on the company. Slow loading prompts the user to look for other competitors having a better performing website even though with a low-quality product. Obtaining a good prospect is a tough job. Let’s not make it tougher by creating an amateurish or a slow loading website.

5. Lags in the market: Search Engine Optimization is a herculean task for any brand. If your website loads slowly, Google just slides you down in the rankings for pages that provide better performance. If the website is slow, the user just presses the back button and this makes search engines think that the content is not relevant to the query and ultimately your website sinks in the rankings. This obviously creates a serious impact on the tough market competitions. If a user abandons your website, you lose both the sale and customer’s loyalty. So, in order to maintain a competitive edge in the market, a fast loading website is a must requirement for any brand.

6. Low conversion rates: Website speed also plays a vital role in determining the conversion rate and customer satisfaction. A delay of just a fraction of a second in the loading speed leads to a loss of 7% conversions. Nearly 46% percent of the users do not revisit slow loading websites. Conversion rates are directly proportional to the revenue growth of the company. Lower conversion rates lead to lower revenue and obviously a poor performance of the business.

7. Also affects the mobile users in sync:  Mobile internet is becoming the order of the day. Any business can become successful only if it is able to reach the massive mobile population effectually. A slow loading website eventually loads slowly in mobile applications too. Poorly performing mobile website just irritates the users and prompts them to switch over to the competitive sites that provide a better service.

Avoid the risk of losing your valuable clients owing to slow loading websites. Enhance the performance of your website with the help of tools like Google Page Insights, Pingdom and GTmetrix that would help greatly to optimize the speed of your WebPages.

One of the best ways to enhance the speed of any website is by using the cPanel plugin, Apachebooster. It has a unique design which has the combined features of both Nginx and Varnish. Flexibility and customizable features of Apachebooster strengthens the server capability and improves the loading speed of the website by improving the performance of Apache software. Apachebooster is extremely easy to install and it supports both static and dynamic caching.

It effectively manages the customer expectations and provides high quality, seamless experience to the users which keeps on upgrading consistently as per technological requirements and also provides a highly enhanced website performance.