Every second, even every split second, makes a difference in your overall conversion rate. A one-second delay in loading time is equivalent to a 7% reduction in conversions and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
The average load time for an automotive website in the United States is 9.5 seconds. According to Google, 53% of users exit a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. How many dealerships are losing car sales because of their slow website? Don’t let your dealership be one of them. This means that your website needs to load fast – in under 4 seconds – to get the attention of your customers immediately.
So, what does that mean for your dealership? When your website doesn’t load quickly enough for your customers, they will exit the page and go to a different car website, which means that you are losing a potential sale. At AutoJini, all of our dealer websites load in under 4 seconds. Keep reading to learn more about how website speed affects your car sales today.
Do Faster Websites Sell More?
The short answer is yes. For every 0.1 seconds faster that Walmart’s website was, they grew their incremental revenue by 1%. Similarly, Amazon did a test to see how speed affects their conversion rates, and a 1 second delay resulted in a $1.6 billion loss per year. Why is this?
It is the first impression you make with your customers. Many customers correlate website speed with a business’s credibility. 52% of customers say that an important factor of their site loyalty is in the website speed, according to Yoast. Therefore, if your dealer website loads faster, your customers will perceive your dealership as more trustworthy.
It also has to do with your customers’ patience. The average person’s attention span is only 8 seconds long, which means that you don’t have a lot of time to connect with your customers. 75% of users will not go back to a page that takes longer than 4 seconds to load, according to Neil Patel. Therefore, if your site doesn’t load quickly and capture your customer’s attention right away, you may have just lost a potential sale because you are no longer in the running.
Your dealer website speed also affects your search engine rankings, which also has a big effect on your conversions. That brings us to our next point.
How Does Website Speed Affect My Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Website speed plays a factor in your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well. Why is that? User behavior accounts for part of it, and the other is crawler behavior. A page that loads slowly is more likely to be exited, which is also known as bouncing. Websites and pages with a higher bounce rate tells Google and other search engines that the site isn’t as valuable to users. That results in a lower page rank, which is detrimental to your dealership. Web crawlers are also fast, and therefore if your website can’t keep up, they won’t index all of your pages.
How Should I Prioritize My Website Speed?
Make sure you prioritize your mobile website first. Over half of all web traffic today comes from a mobile device. Google indexes mobile websites first, which means that it is more important than ever to make sure that your website is responsive or mobile-friendly.
Some businesses opt for a mobile-friendly website, or they build a separate website for their mobile customers. Google actually recommends that websites have a responsive layout, which means your website will automatically adjust to fit any screen size. A responsive website design means that you only have to manage one site that will dynamically change depending on how a user is accessing your site. Responsive designs also load faster and almost always look better.
How Can I Get Started?
Now that you know how important a fast-loading website is, it’s time to get your dealer site to run faster. AutoJini uses several different strategies to speed up your site and get you more sales. To get started, call us at 515-232-2024 or send us a message below.