You’re a top real estate agent with a website already owning an excellent network of clients. You have an outstanding online audience that visits your site on daily basis, some write meaningful comments on your blog section while others call or e-mail you directly for discussing business. After some time, you have noticed that, in spite of your hard work and efforts, online activities are dropping. You’re slowly losing your once engaging audience to your competitors. Bounce rate has increased drastically while conversation rate and search engine rankings are going down.
Have you considered checking your site load speed? How much time do people need to wait for the content on your site to pop up? Statistics show that a majority of people will leave your site if the content doesn’t open in 3 seconds. It takes only a second for someone to decide whether or not they’ll wait or leave the site.
But, why is website load speed so important? What difference does a fraction of a second make?
The answer? It makes a big difference! It affects user experience, search rankings, and even sales and conversions.
Check Out the Following Reasons Why Your Site Speed Matters
The first impression counts: Your clients, readers, and other visitors make an instant judgment about you and your business as a real estate agent when they visit your site. You need to make it worth their time. A fast and responsive site is what they’re looking for. If your website loads fast, you instantly make a strong positive first impression. It’s a quick-win for user experience! If it loads fast, your new visitor is immediately happy. It’s pure psychology. We consider fast websites to be professional and reliable. We relate speed to efficiency, trust, and confidence.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave a website after viewing only one page. Users are likely to close the window or click away if a page does not load within a few seconds. BBC discovered that they lost 10% of their total users for every additional second it took for their pages to load.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): In 2010, Google announced that page speed would be one of the ranking factors taken into consideration when ranking websites. While it’s not the only factor that goes into your search engine rankings, pages that load faster and make use of Google’s recommended best practices tend to rank higher than those that don’t. In 2017, Google announced that page speed would become an even bigger factor in determining your site’s ranking. Your mobile and desktop sites will now be ranked based on signals Google receives from crawling your site through mobile view. This means that the page speed of your mobile site will determine the rankings of both your mobile and desktop sites on Google. Google knows that site speed is important for users so, as I’m sure you care about your users, site speed should be important for you as well. Recently Google updated its site speed tool adding competitor analysis like the percentage of visitors lost due to poor loading speed.
Long Term Effect: We’ve established that slow loading speed leads to an instant drop-off in visitors. Nearly half of your potential visitors have already vanished. But there is a long-term effect here too. That long loading time gradually stunts your natural growth and word-of-mouth.
So how fast is your site? How many potential clients have you lost already due to site slow load speed? Are you ready to make the ultimate decision or you still don’t think it’s worth it? We’re always here for you. We make your online reputation our top priority.
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