Commercial agents: Get loaded quicker!

 

Faster, swifter, nippier, we all seem to want a quicker response. We have become an impatient lot and nowhere more so than when we surf the Internet.

3 Seconds to Keep Them

We’ve spoken at length about the 3 seconds that you have to impress a commercial property customer when they first land on your website. Those split seconds when they make a judgement on your company, your professionalism, knowledge and even the personality of you and the people you employ.

Yet it seems that split seconds can also have other positive effects on the way customers interact and positively react to your website. Research has shown that more than 50% of users will navigate away from a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Time enough for a prospective commercial instruction to be lost.

Mobile Response

Commercial property clients are equally as demanding when viewing websites via a mobile device. Research carried out by Strangeloop Networks has shown that more than half of mobile device users expect a website to load as quickly on their mobile as on a conventional PC.

The most worrying finding for Chartered Surveyors and Commercial Agents is that 40% of mobile users that give up on a slow loading website will visit a competitors website next. Remember that within the property sector, over 30% of the traffic to an agents website already comes via a mobile device.

The Need For Speed

Perhaps our need for speed is something more biological and those that can satisfy our need can profitably benefit from our increasingly impatient nature.

One company that has leant how profitable speed can be is Amazon. They found that for every 100 milliseconds that they could increased page loading times, they saw a 1% increase in sales across their whole website.

Getting The Customer To Read On

A Chartered Surveyors website is the first place where prospective customers learn more about them. If you capture their attention and convey the right impression they’ll read on. Only then will they see the great work you’ve done, the wonderful clients you have and your depth of knowledge in the local commercial property market.

AOL found that users in the top 10% of site speed viewed about 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10%.

Speedy Top Google Rankings

Since April of last year, Google has factored website speed into its search ranking algorithm. That means that a slow website will affect your Google ranking and could put you behind your faster responding competition.

What Affects My Page Speed?

A collection of design and structural elements will influence the speed of your website. If you have a website that is over 5 years old (and many, many of you do), the chances are that the poor and outdate coding used to construct the site will be contributing to your slow page load times.

Flash and large image files also play their part and the way that they are delivered.

In conclusion

Delivering faster information and a quicker experience on your website will increase the chances of being contacted by prospective customer. But if your page load times are slower than the magic three seconds, you could be losing over 50% of your prospective customers to your competition.

Philip Burrows, Marketing Consultant