You’ve probably heard that if your landing page takes longer than 2 seconds to load then users will simply hit the back button.
OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration. But what is true is that load time significantly affects how many users hit the back button when trying to load your website, aka “Bounceâ€.
Load time is an important factor of the user experience, so much so that Google started using it as a ranking factor in their search algorithm.
So what are the costs of using a landing page with poor performance?
The costs of a poorly performing landing page
Ideally, you’d want every visitor to your landing page to perform a call-to-action or at least navigate to another page on your website.
But in practice, what happens is some of those users may get your page by mistake (click on the wrong ad, misinterpreted the link text, etc).
So inevitably there will be some users who bounce from your page.
But these “bouncing†users hurt particularly bad when you are paying for them to click on your ad.
Imagine paying $1 per click. Getting 1000 clicks. Then find out 90% just bounced back. That’s $900 down the drain. Ouch!
Even if you are not advertising, and simply getting traffic organically through SEO, having a low performing landing page could still be costing you.
Say you build backlinks to your website and improve your ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages. Now you are happy, the website gets 1000 visitors a week. Nice job! But wait, your bounce rate is 90%. Now your website is as good as a noobs website getting a measly 400 visitors per month! All that good work squandered 😕.
What you should do to fix it
Start looking at the performance of your landing page as a way to give your business a competitive edge.
You should: Measure current website performance Optimize it Monitor it
In the next article, I will go into the details of how to Measure, Optimize, and Monitor your website’s performance.
