• by Joshua Bixby , November 4, 2010

You spend countless hours and dollars crafting a perfect online campaign -- sales, contests, banner ads, flyers, billboards, print and TV ads, etc. -- to drive people to your site. But if your site doesn't load quickly for the people you attract, all that money and effort is wasted.

You are not alone in this problem, but there are some things you can do to better understand why your website is slow, and ultimately fix it and turn it into a revenue center for your organization.

Site speed has a dramatic impact on four metrics you care about for your marketing campaigns:

1. Page views A study by Aberdeen Group revealed that a 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views. AOL found that visitors in the top ten percentile of site speed viewed 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom ten percentile. Yahoo increased traffic by 9% for every 400 milliseconds of improvement.
2. Cart size Speeding up pages has been shown to increase cart size by 4-6%.
3. Revenue Amazon increased revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of improvement. Shopzilla sped up its average page load time from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds and experienced a 12% increase in revenue.
4. Customer satisfaction Up to 80% of customers are unlikely to return to a site after having a slow initial experience. Microsoft's Bing conducted a study to measure the impact of delay on performance. A mere two-second delay led to a 1.8% drop off in queries, a 3.75% reduction in clicks, more than a 4% loss in satisfaction.

How do you know if your site is slow?
You need to look at your site the same way one of your campaign targets would. Checking out your site from your workplace desktop is not accurate. Not only are you probably using a powerful computer and a T1 connection, but you're also sitting in the same building as your servers.

To get a real sense of how your site behaves for customers, use a free tool such as Webpagetest, which simulates real-world user environments and browser behavior. For instance, if your users live in mid-sized urban locations, you can test from Webpagetest's servers in Dulles, Virginia. If your users are overseas, you can test from international servers spanning the U.K., China and New Zealand.

After you've measured your site's performance, I recommend benchmarking it against your competitors. (To conserve space here, I'd like to point you toward this post on my blog, which offers step-by-step instructions on how to do this.)

What makes a site slow?
There are dozens of factors that can contribute to a sluggish website. Here are some of the common culprits:

• Too many page elements, including third-party content such as ads, ecommerce apps and social media widgets

• Bloated images and animations

• Sites that are only designed to perform well on one or two browsers

• Pages that display the most important content last

How fast should you be?
So you know why speed is important and what is likely slowing it down but do you know where you should set your goals? The ideal site speed is a constantly moving target. In 1999, site visitors expected pages to load in 8 seconds or less. By 2006, that number had shrunk to 4 seconds. In 2009, a consumer survey revealed that more than half of online shoppers said they would abandon a site after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load. And Google has a stated goal of having all pages load in 100 milliseconds.

Ultimately, your goal should be to create an online experience that is as seamless as possible for your customers. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen corroborates what you probably know intuitively: Each extra second of page load time interrupts our flow, making it harder to get back on task when the website finally responds.

How to make your site faster
There are many approaches to improving site speed, both on the development and technology sides. These solutions can be used individually or they can complement each other:

• Use a content delivery network to store your content closer to your users.

• Have your developers optimize your site's code by utilizing performance best practices that have been created by Yahoo and Google.

• Implement hardware and services that do this optimization automatically.

After all the hard work you've put into a marketing campaign, make sure it doesn't fall flat because you didn't think of one critical element -- your website. If you are seriously committed to making your site faster, the first step is to identify the solution gaps in your organization and start investigating ways to fill them. The ROI can be fast and dramatic.