Is Your Website Ready for the Holiday Shopping Rush?
All of the Internet Marketing in the world won't save you if your website isn't up to handling the traffic you will reap if your online marketing strategies are a success. According to a recent report done by Jupiter Research which was featured on Internet Retailer, searchers who are utilizing the web to purchase their gifts this holiday season rank website page loading speed the top priority when they are looking to shop and purchase.
The days of the 8 second rule are gone. If your site doesn't load up in 4 seconds or less, all of your online marketing efforts are for naught. Why? Because if the user's experience is a bad one, especially with slow loading pages, 75% of them won't come back. To add another number to that, 30% of those shoppers will form a negative opinion of your company itself, and you'll have one heck of an uphill battle to turn that back around.
What's even more compelling is that according to another report by Gomez, Inc. (they are a company that frequently reports on the performance and speed of the Internet Retailer 500) found that 9 out of 10 people they surveyed, will shop online more this year for the major percentage of their gifts than ever before. Out of that number over half have experienced problems with website retailer sites, from issues with shopping carts to website loading speeds. Nearly all of those surveyed made complaints that the websites they were going to, to shop on, loaded entirely to slow.
So here's some advice for all the Internet marketers out there (whether your a black hat, gray hat, white hat, seo, sem, womm, blogger, or a pr person optimizing for the web) go to the slowest computer you can find and time how fast your site loads. Then go to the slowest Internet connection you can find and time how fast your site loads. If either is more than 4 seconds, you should be getting on the phone with your IT department or your technical people or your site designers before all of your online marketing efforts are wasted.
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