Small Business Owners, Are You Wasting Money on Slow Loading Websites?
You’ve just decided to take the plunge and open your own small business. You’ve created a business plan, told all your friends and family about your new venture, registered as an LLC, created social media pages, and are about to launch your brand-new business site. Congratulations! You’re probably working as a one (wo)man band, doing everything from marketing to sales to customer service and more, depending on the nature of your business. In order to join the online business landscape, we’ve assembled the small business owner’s guide to online caching. This article is going to answer (in layman’s terms), what online caching is and why it’s crucial to the success of your online business website. But most importantly, you’ll learn how to grow your customer base and sales by increasing your website’s speed and performance.
TLDR: What Is Server-side Caching and What Are Its Pros and Cons??
Caching is a technique to store data as a “cache” (a block of data in textual or binary format) in order to improve the user experience. The cache is a memory to hold temporary files, or data from apps, servers, websites, or browsers, in order to help them load faster. This includes videos, images, scripts, files, and more.
While there are many types of website caching, (like client-side and remote caching), server-side caching has the greatest impact on your small business website’s loading time, speed, performance, and conversion rates. A server-side cache temporarily saves and stores web files and data on the server as a cache. So, instead of your website loading each time for every user, it loads the cached version of the website for users from the very first visit.
The Pros and Cons of Server-side Caching
Ultimately, server-side caching improves your website speed and performance, providing your users with faster site loading, a better user experience, more time on page, a higher Google ranking, and higher conversion ratios. .But, server-side caching won’t magically fix all of your website’s speed and performance issues, and also
presents the risk of giving users old or outdated website information and can impair your ability to run A/B testing or personalize website content for selected website audiences.
If You’re a Small Business Owner Here’s Why Online Caching Matters
If you’re a small business owner, optimizing your website cache is crucial for website loading speed, user time on page, your website’s Google SEO ranking, and your website conversion ratios.
And, since 2010, Google has taken website speed into consideration as a website ranking factor.
“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed; that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”
–Google Search Central 2010 Update
Your website speed on mobile is equally important, and has been a Google ranking factor since 2018:
“Users want to find answers to their questions quickly, and data shows that people really care about how quickly their pages load. The Search team announced speed would be a ranking signal for desktop searches in 2010, and as of this month (July 2018), page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too.”
–Google Chrome Developers 2018 Update
The Value of Your Site’s Online Cache In Dollars and Cents
According to Hubspot, “a slow website is a bad website.” And here’s why they’re not wrong…
- A 2019 Unbounce survey found that 70% of users said that site speed affected their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
- A website’s conversion rate will drop by 4.42% for every additional second it takes to load (between 0-5 seconds.)
- As your website’s load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the likelihood of a user bouncing (leaving your website after viewing just one page) increases by 32%.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how your site’s loading time could potentially impact your conversion rate (and your bottom line,) based on a Portent research study of 100 million webpages across B2B and B2C.
*Remember, there are numerous factors that influence your website’s ranking and conversion rates, including (but not limited to) page loading speed.
|
Site Load Speed in Seconds |
Site Users |
Approximate Conversion Rate |
Number of Sales |
|
1 |
5,000 |
3.9% |
195 |
|
2 |
5,000 |
3.4% |
170 |
|
3 |
5,000 |
2.9% |
145 |
|
4 |
5,000 |
2.4% |
120 |
|
5 |
5,000 |
2.2% |
110 |
|
6 |
5,000 |
1.8% |
90 |
*Conversion rates reach their lowest at 6 seconds, with conversion rates at about half of the rate of a fast website.
Conclusion:
Fast website and page loading times are crucial to increasing your small business website’s conversion rates and sales.
How Fast Should Your Small Business Website Load?
Portent conducted a 2022, in-depth research study of 100 million webpages across B2B and B2C, and found that the gold standard for website page loading is between 1-4 seconds for goal conversions (i.e. asking a user to send their contact details via a lead form) and 1-2 seconds for transaction conversions (i.e. making a purchase off of a website.)
Here’s How to Find Out Your Website’s Load Time
There are a number of tools you can use to measure your website’s performance (a critical factor in their SEO ranking system), like Google Page Speed Insights Tool,and WebPageTest.
According to the Google Page Speed Insight Tool, your website’s performance score will fall into one of three categories:
- 90+ = Fast
- 50 – 90 = Moderate
- Below 50 = Slow
Use the Page Speed Insights Tool to Get Performance Insights About Your Site, Including Sight Speed.
Google’s Page Speed Insights Gives You Importance Performance Insights About Your Mobile and Desktop Site.
Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool Even Provides Suggestions to Improve Your Site’s Performance
How to Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance By Clearing Cache
Your website’s cache will eventually empty after a set period of time. However, sometimes you’ll need to manually clear your cache in order to see changes that have just been
made to your website. For example, there are a number of caching plugins available for WordPress websites that allow you to enable or disable a full or partial cache. (Bear in mind that other website builders may require code changes or more complexity in order to change your site caching options. So, this is definitely something to take into consideration when choosing your website provider.)
In addition, many website hosting providers will also allow you to download a plugin for your WordPress website builder and provide you with full visibility and control over your website’s cache.
HostGator, a popular website hosting company, offers granular website caching options, from disabling your website cache completely (which we do not recommend) to caching static assets for 1 week and web pages for 8 hours. HostGator even goes a step further and provides recommendations for which caching type is best suited for your exact small business website – but ultimately leaves the choice up to you.
Final Thoughts: Time Is Money
It takes so much time, effort, and money to attract traffic to your website that you definitely don’t want to lose customers over something as fixable as your website’s online caching. Optimizing your online cache is core to improving your website’s speed and performance and has serious implications for your website’s users, your business, and your bottom line
