Yesterday I wrote about Why Google places so much importance on site speed, in my post Why Does Google Place Importance On Load Speed For Ranking.

In this post I want to talk about the more important reason why you should speed up your site and that is user or customer experience.

Google has done a lot of research into site load speeds and how that affects the number of funnel completions made.

To translate that from Google Geek into normal speak that means that Google has analysed the correlation between site load speed and people actually buying something, or completing some other call to action on a site.  Slow loading sites consistently fail to achieve their call to action.

In the case of Google it is clicks on their ads  see this post http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters.html.

Here Comes the Sales Pitch

Just in case it is not 100% clear I am running a Workshop on performance tuning on Thursday 12th May to teach people how to improve the speed of their site. For full details of the workshop, check out this post.

Here is why I think load speed is so important to your customer’s visit.

User Experience

Offline business knows that the user experience is very important.  If you walk into a shop, the assistants are attentive (usually 🙂  ) they have been trained to give you a good user experience when using the store.  They will efficiently point you in the direction of the widgets you want, take time to explain how the Widget Meister 3000 works.

Having a slow loading site is like having surly teenagers server you in a fast food restaurant, all they want to do is slam the plastic tray over the counter and take your money.  A slow loading site says you don’t care about the user experience of your site visitor, just get to my sales page so we can move onto the real service or product delivery.

If you work online you will probably never meet your clients, you need to give a great impression, that is not just excellent site design, beautifully crafted copy, but also a positive user experience.

Unprofessional

A slow site comes across as an unprofessional, poorly put together site.   Is you site visitor thinking “What is their service or product like if their front of house website is so slow?”

Don’t let an excellent service or product be mired by a slow site.

Frustrating

Your potential customer does not need to be frustrated before they have even requested a quote, what kind of impression are you giving that person?

Make it easy and painless to get to that call to action on your site, don’t leave them sitting whilst your browser churns away loading up pages.

First Impressions Count

It’s a cliché because it is true, people aren’t coming back to you site a second time if they are turned off my site load speed.

Can You Speed Up A WordPress Site?

In a word yes, there are a number of techniques you can use to speed up your WordPress site. They involve tweaking your site, optimising plugins and theme files. removing unnecessary code and caching your system with plugins.

I’m running a workhop on Thursday 12th May to teach people how to improve the speed of their site. For full details of the workshop, check out this post.