Slow Website Performance And Customer Satisfaction

Slow website performance is generally regarded as a web curse of any business. For instance, long-to-load pages negatively affect platforms’ SEO indexation. Meanwhile, in the fast-paced 2024, not only the algorithms, but users themselves pay much attention to time. 

According to research by Google, they expect your platform to provide pages in less than 2 seconds, dream of 0,5 seconds, and regard a 10-second delay as a serious reason to quit a platform immediately in a bad mood. Thus, the slow website performance and customer satisfaction seem to be correlated. Let’s check this hypothesis. 

Customer Satisfaction 

Customer satisfaction (CS) is a measurement that determines how clients are happy with the products or services they get. This is the driving force of any business, for it influences loyalty, retention, sales, and word-of-mouth marketing. 

Trying to win the tough market competition, companies do their best to surpass clients’ expectations. They consider that customer satisfaction is not about the final sale only: to make a user reach it, each step of their journey should be comfortable, from exploring branding and visuals to the payment method and the support services. So, businesses collect user feedback and multiple data, analyze it, and integrate it into their products’ updates, regarding each CS component separately.

Components

The main factors that contribute to customer satisfaction include product quality, service efficiency, brand reputation, and user experience. 

Product Quality

The so-called product quality consists of its accordance with the customer’s expectations in terms of perception, choices, performance, unicity, sensory, and cognitive use experience, the product’s price, and longevity.

Service Efficiency

Nearly 50% of customers leave brands due to the lack of derived efficiency. They expect it to be instant, polite, optimized, and personalized. Also, they want it to meet the brand’s representation.

Brand Reputation

Brand reputation is something that can either significantly contribute to customers’ satisfaction or destroy it. Companies that have failed the representation game by providing low-quality services or making sound mistakes are subconsciously regarded by potential clients as irrelevant even after improvements. Ones that lack a friendly community also face risks. Thus, all the reputational problems should be timely solved.

User Experience

Apart from product quality, user experience is the cornerstone of other customer satisfaction elements. Meanwhile, the user experience itself is a diverse aspect composed of multiple factors. They include:

• A platform’s usability in terms of how logically structured and intuitive it is for users; User interface design (UI) with visual design elements like buttons and icons; 
• Information architecture (IA) related to the organization and labeling of a platform’s content;
• Interaction design (IxD) that considers ways users interact with technology;
• Emotional Design aimed to elicit positive emotions in users;
• Performance and load time that affects a page (or an application) loads and becomes interactive. 

Importantly, the load time of a platform is something that determines overall customer satisfaction. When a website works slowly, 90% of users get irritated, and 60% of them even leave it without potential sales and, in some cases, with negative feedback. 80% of disappointed clients never come back. Also, load time influences SEO for websites with faster load time tend to rank higher.

Slow Website Performance

Slow-loading websites influence sales. For instance, due to it,  the retail industry players face losses of $2.6 billion. Other data shows that a 1-second delay can decrease customer satisfaction by 16%, and 52% of online shoppers find quick load vital for their loyalty formation.

Case studies, available online, also prove the negative consequences of slow website performance. For instance, Walmart faced a significant decline in conversion rate when its average site load time increased from 1 to 4 seconds. Google lost 20% of its traffic for every additional 100 milliseconds needed for a page load. A study by Akamai Technologies showed that a 1-second delay in page load is likely to result in a 7% decrease in conversion rates. 

Reasons

The reasons for slow website performance vary from network Issues a company itself can’t solve, to the ones that businesses are responsible for themselves. Let’s name the key of them.

Sizes

Huge files like images, videos, and other media that are not optimized for the web can take a long time to load, slowing down the overall site performance. Meanwhile, 10% of pages can save more than 1MB and boost load time.

Code

Bulky code, including HTML/CSS, JavaScript, or backend scripts that are not minified or optimized, leads to slower response times.

Excessive HTTP 

Each piece of a website needs an HTTP request to load, but when they are too numerous, page load time slows down. Thus, ad and widget overloads also cause problems.

No Caching

Caching stores copies of files and data to reduce load time for repeat visitors. Without it, customers have to load a website’s resources from scratch.

Bad Hosting

A low-quality or shared hosting impacts a website’s performance.

No Asynchronous Loading

Asynchronous loading enables web pages to load faster.

Lack Of Optimization

Websites that are not optimized for mobile devices load slowly.

Solution

A 1-second improvement in page load times can increase conversions by 2%. So, the “slow problem” should be solved quickly. The first step towards it is the in-depth analysis of the overall website performance that can identify all mistakes and areas for improvement. 

Through performance testing, businesses can enhance site speed, boost customer satisfaction and thus, sales. The process is multifaceted and includes metrics like the load time, the start time, time to first byte, speed index, first contentful paint, first meaningful paint (LH), input latency (LH), and time to interactive (LH). To get more details about them and outline your plan for website performance improvement, check a special article.

Conclusion

Slow website performance, already notorious for causing SEO issues, directly impacts user experience and thus, customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, performance testing stands out as a potent solution to the challenges. So, businesses should work on it and consider: that improving website performance is not just about speeding up load times — it’s about building a foundation for lasting customer loyalty.