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3 Seconds – That’s how long it can take for a potential customer to go to a competing business while your website was still loading. Not surprisingly, the amount of visitors that leave your website increases exponentially with each additional second of load time.

These estimates, focusing on mobile websites, came out in an article posted by Google’s DoubleClick platform. Honestly, when I heard these statistics, I wasn’t surprised, because I do the exact same thing. Whether you can relate or not, one thing is undeniable, technology is constantly pushing the envelope and getting increasingly more efficient and faster.

Speed isn’t exceptional, it’s expected. Each new generation with new and faster devices will only demand faster speeds, so unfortunately we won’t be able to look the other way and hope this problem just goes away.

Here are some surprising statistics you may not have known:

The first step to making sure your website is speedy enough is to check the numbers! If you aren’t running analytics that are specifically testing your website load time, there are some resources online that you can go to that will test this for free. One such resource is Pingdom.

What if my website is slow?

There are a number of factors that go into page load time. The largest and most manageable factor is the website page content. Images, sound and videos can be considerably large in size compared to other aspects of the website. A good web development team will resize images and use optimal image formats so as to reduce file size as much as possible without compromising the integrity of the images. Getting pictures to the lowest file size while keeping a crisp look is challenging, but a pro can accomplish this with professional tools like Adobe Photoshop.

Other speed inhibiting factors could be web hosting, especially if hosted by a lower quality server provider. If your website gets high volumes of traffic or runs any e-commerce or transactional elements, it’s important to get a high quality web host with a good reputation. Sometimes, in this case, you get what you pay for. Price, however, doesn’t always translate to quality so this is where a little research can go a long way into making your website fast and reliable.

Keeping on top of your website analytics is the best way to monitor your website health and mitigate any problems that arise. Having a dependable web developer or website team is important too!