Full Transcript
Lauren: Okay so a friend of mine has a Wix site for her business. It's been up for like three years, it works, people can find her... And she asked me, why would I ever switch?
Honor: Welcome to the 805 Web Minute with Lauren and Honor... We make interwebs and website stuff make sense... Let's get into it.
Honor: That's a fair question. If it works, it works. But here's the thing... there are problems that sneak up on you over time. Things you don't notice until they're already costing you customers.
Lauren: Okay, like what kind of problems?
Honor: The biggest one is speed. When you're inside the Wix editor building your site, everything feels snappy. You're clicking around, things load... But that's not what your visitors experience.
Lauren: Oh... so it feels fast to me but not to them?
Honor: Exactly. And here's the scary part... 53 percent of people will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load on their phone.
Lauren: Wait, fifty-three percent? That's more than half!
Honor: More than half your potential customers are gone before they even see what you do. And it gets worse... even a two-second delay doubles your bounce rate.
Lauren: Doubles it?
Honor: A hundred and three percent increase. Whatever number of people were already leaving... double that.
Lauren: Okay that's terrifying. But why are Wix sites slow? Like what's going on under the hood?
Honor: They're built with a lot of heavy code... JavaScript files, extra stuff that has to load before your visitor sees anything. Fast internet? Maybe you don't notice. But customers on their phones? They feel every second.
Lauren: That's like having a restaurant with a really slow door. People are standing outside waiting to get in, and after a few seconds they just... walk away and eat somewhere else.
Honor: Perfect. And you'd never know they were there. You just wonder why the restaurant is empty.
Lauren: Oh wow. So what about my friend who built her site three years ago... is that making things worse?
Honor: Yes. I call it the good enough trap. Her site was good enough in 2022. But since then... competitors upgraded to modern fast sites... Google keeps raising the bar... customers now expect everything to load instantly.
Lauren: So good enough three years ago is not good enough today.
Honor: Right. And the gap keeps widening. The longer you wait, the more you're falling behind... and you don't realize it because you're not seeing the customers you're losing.
Lauren: That's kind of haunting actually.
Honor: Yeah. There are other issues too... the time you spend maintaining it yourself, the fact that you can't export a Wix site if you want to leave... But speed is the silent killer.
Lauren: So what's the one thing she should do right now to see if this is a problem?
Honor: Pull out your phone and visit your own website. Not on wifi... use your phone's data. Time how long it takes to see everything load. If it's more than three seconds, you've got a problem.
Lauren: So the moral is... your site might feel fine to you, but test it like your customers would. And if it's slow, you're losing people you never knew about.
Honor: And those people are going to your competitors instead.
Lauren: And if the test doesn't go well... give YouGrow a call!
Honor: Yeah. We build fast sites... no bloated code slowing you down. 79 dollars a month, month-to-month, unlimited updates... you email or call and we handle it. We're local, right here in Arroyo Grande. Your site can be live in days.
Lauren: Nice. Alright, this has been 805 Web Minute. Thanks for listening.