Website Performance and its Strategic Importance

When it comes to customer expectations regarding website performance, they're mainly looking for high performance. Therefore not having the ability to have a fast loading and quickly responding website can adversely impact a business in many ways.
Slow Sites Lead to Lost Revenue A lot of people have a tendency to expect a website load in as little time as possible. Therefore slower page loading times can result in enhanced page abandonment. It has been discovered that about 40% of users would probably abandon a website provided it failed to load within 2-3 3 seconds. This is a lot more prominent for e-commerce sites that can potentially experience loss of revenue even with a page delay of 1 second. This lost revenue because of slow websites is a very high value for very popular e-commerce sites.

A Google study conducted in 2015 shows that if an app or website takes a lot of time and energy to load, 29% of smartphone owners immediately shift to another website for satisfying their needs. On the list of ones who switch, about 70% do so because of slow loading times.

On the other hand, it has additionally been seen that improvements in loading time boosts the conversions for an e-commerce website. This may boost both the top-line and bottom-line.

Degraded Site Performance Reduces Long Term Loyalty of Customers Poor digital performance is among the significant reasons why many companies neglect to retain their customers in the long run. Moreover, about 75% of internet surfers who have experienced problems with a site that is too slow, freezes and crashes or incorporates a rather complicated checkout process are not going to visit that site or buy things as a result later on. Another study revealed that whenever certain webpages got slowed down for approximately 12 weeks, they took almost 6 weeks to accomplish their normal traffic levels.

Reputational Damage from Slowly Loading Websites Poor web experiences can result in customers getting frustrated and they are also more likely to share such negative experiences making use of their friends and family. A number of the customers may even use various social media marketing channels to offer their negative reviews. Such bad reviews could make the website lose a lot of potential customers who have a tendency to shy away because of the negativity associated with the site.

Higher Costs for Running a CUSTOMER SUPPORT A poorly performing website may also negatively impact the budget of the company since more resources will be required for problem solving as customers call in to complain about the obstacles they face while using a niche site.

Productivity Losses Poorly performing websites not only put a significant strain online admin team but they can also hamper employee productivity in a significant way. After the website goes down, then resources are typically borrowed from other teams to diagnose the problem, resolve it or test the fix. It's been discovered that outages of the IT department cost companies around $700 billion every year, out which about 78% is caused by poor productivity. From these facts, we are able to extrapolate that even with website downtime also productivity losses are incurred by the business sites.