“It takes 10 seconds for my WordPress site to load!” a frantic business owner says on our initial phone call.
It’s a common complaint.
Is your slow site costing you sales?
This might seem obvious, but if you don’t know definitively that your slow website is costing you sales, then you have no business assuming that it is costing you sales.
I’ve seen slow websites generate loads of revenue, and I’ve seen blazing fast, completely worthless websites.
Each second of slowed-down load time costs Amazon $1.6 billion!
But forcing a potential visitor wait an extra second on your WordPress site might cost you zilch!
People Will Wait For Valuable Services
How Valuable Is Your Service?
The more niche your service, the more valuable your service, the more time people will wait for it.
I’ve seen people wait 15 minutes for coffee at Angry Catfish and be happy with the long wait times. (Not me, though – I don’t value the coffee that much!)
If you have something unique & valuable to offer, people will wait.
You’ll wait in the emergency room, in the doctor’s office, at the airport, in lines at cash registers, etc. etc. etc.
You’ll wait, because the cost of waiting is less than the cost of the thing you are buying.
Same with websites.
Slow WordPress Site? Don’t Freak Out.
I’ve seen people throw whole days down the drain troubleshooting Google Pagespeed recommendations for things like loading scripts in the footer, CSS minification, file concatenation, caching, and more.
I’m not saying those things don’t impact load times – they do.
But what I’m saying is that page speeds rarely matter for your business.
Business Depends on Sales, Not Page Speeds
I work with a large media company in town on optimizing their business’ digital assets. Their WordPress page speeds are not great.
But their salespeople never report customer complaints about page load times. Nope.
This successful media company’s customers need other stuff, so that’s what they focus on.
And their buyers (you and me), need something else entirely…still not fast page speeds.
Things like beautiful images, catchy leads, great editing, unique content – that’s what keeps readers around. Not page speeds.
Page Speed Is a False Metric
Your website’s page speed or page load times are website metrics, not business metrics.
You might be losing customers due to slow load times, but probably not.
Business people, except in large B2C cases, rarely complain about website load times.
Because business people know that there are diminishing returns in focusing on load times.
They know that messaging, the right product at the right time, and relationships are far more important.
Page Speed Can Matter
Before you get your undies in a bunch, know that page speed can matter. (I’ve said as much above. See B2C companies like Amazon, Target, etc.)
But for you…probably not.
Once you reach “fast-enough”, that’s all you need.
How fast is “fast-enough”? You’ll need to sell something to find out.
Actively-selling is the only way to find out.
How To Test If Page Speed Matters for You
- Set up 2 sites: WordPress and Shopify. (Shopify will always be faster than your WordPress site, but it comes with lots of downsides).
- Have an identical product on both sites.
- a/b test the “add-to-cart”/”checkout” links.
Now you will know whether or not your page speed is a blocker for sales:
- If you didn’t sell products either way, then your issue is definitely not page speed.
- If Shopify sold way more than WordPress, then you probably have a page speed issue. Consider switching to Shopify or speed up your WordPress site.
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[…] The first step is to figure out if page speed is actually an issue for your business. […]