Businesses spend a lot of money trying to increase their online revenue. Money is spent on search engine optimization, webpage design and testing, advertising, social media marketing, pay per click, promotional campaigns, and email marketing.

All of these methods take skill to master and money to implement. However, there is one cliche that some businesses are overlooking: you are only as strong as your weakest link. You can soup up a car engine as much as you like but if the wheels are missing, the car isn’t going anywhere.

This cliche seems to be lost on some of the well known websites that the public go to for their reading. They have brilliant content written by brilliant people and have well designed pages monetized with clever advertising and yet…they take too long to fully load. The viewer is forced to wait for all of the various components to load up before the page finally settles down enough to allow the viewer to do some reading. The page is souped up with complexity but lacks the server “muscle” to make it happen. These sites are certainly making money because of their brand super status but they could make so much more if only their webpages loaded faster.

There is frequent reference to the increasing impatience of the online visitor. While many people are genuinely impatient and can’t tolerate waiting even three seconds for a page to load, the issue of webpage abandonment has more to do with our increasing reliance on the Internet as a tool for productivity.

Productivity in this sense means getting more done whether at work or at home with our limited amount of time. If one needs to use multiple websites and web applications to get their work or shopping done on time, then yes, three seconds is too long to wait. For some people, getting through their day requires visiting and using hundreds of webpages each day. At this level of usage, waiting three seconds per webpage has a significant effect on one’s personal productivity.

Before there was an Internet, people relied on books, catalogs, periodicals, and other reading material. Most people can flip a page faster than three seconds. If the Internet is an improvement over paper, then why should it take three seconds to go from page one to page two of an online article?

According to tagman.com:

“Just one second delay in page-load can cause 7% loss in customer conversions”

If you make money from your website, ecommerce site, or web application, a simple and relatively inexpensive change will boost your revenue: make your site load faster by using more reliable and faster server hosting. For more information on fast and reliable server hosting, please contact us.