Visitors will wait – for about 3 seconds.
If your site is running slowly, you are undoubtedly losing customers and sales. So how slow is slow? Nearly half of all people will leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. The geniuses at Google have done extensive testing and found that traffic decreased by more than 20% for every one-half second it took a page to load. Visitors have a very short attention span, and there is no shortage of other websites they could visit instead.
But that’s not all. Search engines like Google can actually penalize slow-loading websites! So not only are you losing visitors with slow page-load speeds, now you’re losing website traffic because Google decided your site is too slow. This one-two punch can essentially render your site useless.
Mobile users are especially susceptible to slow-loading websites. Download times are much longer over cellular networks, and smartphones lack the processing power of a desktop computer. Since Internet use on mobile devices surpassed desktop computers in 2014, it’s critical that your website load quickly. If your site takes an eternity to load, your customer is going to click away from your site and likely never come back.