How often have you just hung up your phone because you’ve become oversaturated with cheesy elevator music, while waiting to talk to a real person?

No one likes to be put on hold, but that’s exactly what you are doing to your potential customers if your website page load-time is too slow. They probably won’t notice how fast it loads, but they will notice how slow it is—and find someone else to do business with.

Website page load-speed is critical for retaining visitors, but it also optimizes your search engine visibility and reduces the costs of running your site.

There are several potential causes of slow page delivery, including page design, large media files/ads, or more importantly, an overloaded hosting environment—to name a few.

If you plan to deliver video and if you want content and product information to load quickly, you need a low-latency*, reliable and scalable hosting infrastructure.

* Latency is the amount of time between when something was started and when you can see its effects: your page load-time.

Your analytics reports tell you where your audience leaves your site – refer to your bounce rate. Also, you can easily test the speed of your site and there are ample resources online for doing so.

Here are a few:

Pingdom

Webpagetest

Vertain

Find out where you stand, and when it comes time to redesign your website, consider how important a factor speed can be for sales, page-views and user experience.  Let’s face it, speed affects customer retention and can influence your search engine ranking.  Isn’t it time you looked into an infrastructure that will fulfill the need for speed?