How is your web hosting affecting your business?

Did you know that a slow host can create a revenue loss for your business?

Website load times have been identified as a crucial factor to measure the performance of a website. With the information deluge on the Internet, user’s patience levels have been continuously decreasing which can result in less leads and sales.

For e-commerce sites, web loading times are even more crucial than other sites. It has been found that a delay of microseconds can potentially cause a significant loss of revenue. Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007). Google discovered that a change in a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006).

If you are running an e-commerce website, this type of visitor loss can be directly attributed to a loss in sales. In your analytics reports (Google Analytics, shopping cart reports, and others), you are likely tracking goals, goal values, and conversion rates. Now you can calculate your potential revenue loss.

Based on the graph here an 8 second load time (4 seconds above the optimal load time of 4 seconds) could result in 75.75% visitor loss, which means you could be losing out on an additional 320 visitors with a slow load time.

Here is an example:

• Your website takes 8 seconds to load
• Your average sale price is $100
• Your average conversion rate is 2%
• You get an average of 1,000 visitors per day

So with your conversion rate of 2%, that means these 320 visitors could have resulted in 6 buyers per day at an average of $100, means you could lose up to $600 per day, or $18,000 per month.

That’s a staggering $216,000 per year. Not enough facts yet?
Checkout this article.