It’s a known fact that no digital branding efforts will reap results without a dynamic, informative website. Your website is the first point of contact between your brand and your online audience—making website UI design a crucial element of focus. Not to forget, online users are extremely fickle-minded, meaning they will jump to a different website at the drop of a hat if their experience with yours is flawed.
So brands have to create websites that load at lightning speeds and deliver an enriching experience to visitors. Here’s why website load times are so important for digital branding:
Boosting user experience
People visit a website expecting a quality experience. It’s quite subjective, meaning their judgement varies from person to person and situation and situation. But website performance remains a constant requirement throughout the lead-to-customer journey. It’s human behavior to abandon low-performing applications. So website load time is one of the major factors shaping the experience visitors have with a website.
Retaining visitors
It’s not just enough to get people to click on your website. You also have to keep them. Slow-loading websites and session dropouts are one of the many reasons why users leave websites. Brands with 30 or more landing pages create 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10. Also, a 1-second delay in page load times can lead to a 7-percent loss in conversions and a 16 percent reduction in customer satisfaction (Source). Clearly, a website that loads faster tends to hook visitors to it.
Increasing conversions
Every brand aims to convert website visitors into actual customers. The general conversion rates are 1%. But landing pages help the top 25 percent of companies to get an average conversion rate of 5.31% or higher. At the same time, 52 percent of businesses and brand marketing agencies use landing pages to test them to improve conversions. This is the reason why website UI design should focus on reducing load times to turn the website into a conversion-boosting machine.
Boosting search ranking
Last but certainly not the least, website load time is important for staying at the top of search engine results pages. Google is particular about the websites it ranks and surely considers load time as one of the ranking factors. Since it wants to make information available to users at the click of a mouse, it assigns a higher rank to websites that load faster. So make sure all your website elements are optimized to reduce bounce rates, increase session times, and boost digital branding efforts.
