Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute. And today we're talking about the secret cost hiding in plain sight on your website. It really is. It's the silent killer of conversions. And it's not bad marketing copy. It's speed. Our deep dive today centers on a single shocking fact. Waiting just three seconds for your website to load is actually costing your business more than half of its potential customers right here on the central coast. And that's exactly what we want to dig into. We've looked at everything from you know Google's own developer documents to e-commerce studies. And the message is just it's universal. Yeah. It doesn't matter if you're vineyard and pass a roadbloz, a rental place and Pismo beach or a little shop and Grover Beach. Right. Your website is your front door. And if it's slow, you're essentially locking that door before people can even get inside. We're moving past the idea that a slow site is just annoying. This is about financial damage. We have to start with what we call the three second rule. It's a crucial statistic. The data shows that 53% of mobile visitors. Yeah. So over half will just leave a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. 53%. So they're gone before they even see what you're selling. They're gone. It's not just a high bounce rate. It's half your audience deciding probably subconsciously that your business just isn't reliable. And that completely changes how you think about advertising. I mean, if you're running ads to get that click and half those people disappear instantly, you're literally just burning money. Exactly. And that's why Google is so obsessed with speed. Their whole business is serving up fast, relevant answers. So if someone clicks your link, waits, and then immediately hits the back button, well, Google sees that. They see it as a poor user experience. And they penalize you for it. They do. They'll push your site further down the search rankings. OK, let's talk about that loss because the numbers, they're not linear. Are they? It seems like every extra second hurts more than the last. The data is just brutal. If your site goes from a really snappy one second load time to say three seconds. OK, a two second difference.
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Right. The chance of someone abandoning your site increases by 32%. But then if you creep up from one second to five seconds, the loss of customers, it jumps to a 90% increase in abandonment. 90%. That's a cliff. It is. You fall right off. And we're not just talking about huge online stores. For a local business in a taskadero or SLO. I mean, if you're a contractor who needs five good leads a week, losing almost a third of your traffic to speed issues is catastrophic over a year. It absolutely is. And think about the people who do wait. That friction, that little bit of doubt, it damages their willingness to actually buy something. Our sources show that a site that loads in one second converts two and a half times better than a site that loads in five. Friction just kills sales. So if we put a dollar a month on this, I think I saw it's about a one second delay. Yeah, a one second delay causes on average a seven percent drop in conversions. But on a phone where most local searches happen, that loss can be as high as 20%. Per second. Wow. Seven percent might not sound huge, but for a small retail shop in San Locibispo, if your average sale is a hundred bucks, that's seven out of every hundred sales just gone. Because it's a slow page. It's preventable bleeding, a constant drain. Okay, so let's unpack this. It's not just about the total load time, right? Google is smarter than that. They measure specific moments, these core web vitals. Right. You have to stop thinking about a loading bar. Google is measuring perception. Does the site feel fast? Does it feel responsive? What are they actually looking at? There are three key things. And if you fail even one of them, you get penalized. The first is about what the user sees first that, oh, okay, it's working moment. The first impression. Exactly. It's called the largest contentful paint or LCP. Basically, how quickly does the biggest thing on your screen, the main image, the headline actually appear. Google wants that to happen in under two and a half seconds. And if it doesn't, if it doesn't, the user's brain switches from I'm waiting to this
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is broken and they're gone. Okay, so LCP is the first hurdle. What's next? The second is all about responsiveness. Google calls it interaction to next paint or INP. It's about how quickly the page reacts when you do something like tapping a button. Exactly. When you tap add to cart or try to open a photo, that page should respond in under 200 milliseconds. 200 milliseconds. That's instantaneous. Yeah. It feels that way. Anything slower feels sluggish. You know that feeling when you tap a button and nothing happens, so you tap it again. Oh, yeah. And you end up adding two things to your cart by accident. That's a bad INP score. It tells the user your site is clunky and unreliable. That makes total sense. Okay. So what's the third one? This one sounds like the most frustrating. It is. It's stability. The term is cumulative layout shift or CLS. This is when the page layout jumps around while it's loading. Oh, I hate this. You go to tap a link and then boom, and add loads and you hit the add instead. The digital rug pull. That's exactly it. Google penalizes that heavily because it feels deceptive even when it's an accident. It erodes trust. And the crazy thing is our sources say that almost half of all websites, like 38% are failing these tests right now. Which is a huge opportunity. If you can just get this right, you're already ahead of half your competition here on the central coast. So if you're selling the same thing as the business next door and your site passes and theirs doesn't, you get the better spot from Google and you keep the customer. Simple as that. Okay. This brings us to the practical side. If this is so important, why are so many local websites so slow? We see the same things over and over. Yeah. There are a few usual suspects. It almost always comes down to choosing, you know, convenience over performance. And I bet number one is images. Yeah. Giant, beautiful, but way too big images. It's the biggest one. People will upload a five megabyte photo straight from their phone, but your visitor is looking at it on a little six and screen. They don't need all that data. So what's the fix?
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Is it just making the JPG smaller? That helps. But the real win is using modern formats like WebP. WebP can cut the file size by like 50 to 80% with no visible loss in quality. It's a huge deal. Converting 20 big photos to WebP can literally shave seconds off your load time. Okay. So that's problem one. Problem two is a bit more hidden. It's the junk code from DIY builders. Yeah. This is the convenience trap. Platforms like Wix or Squarespace or even WordPress with a lot of those drag and drop page builders. They have to load tons of extra code to make all that stuff work. Code the user can't even see. Exactly. It's like your website has to load its own little operating system before can show your menu. That's why those DIY platforms fail Google speed tests 40 to 60% of the time. You trade a low upfront cost for this invisible ongoing customer loss. You got it. Okay. Third problem. Cheap hosting. Paying five bucks a month. Think of it like a crowded apartment building. Your website is sharing one server with maybe thousands of other sites. If your neighbor has a huge traffic spike, everyone slows down. Everyone slows down. Your local Oroio Grande bakery site is suddenly competing for resources. You can't be fast if you're fighting for scraps. And the last one is just trying to do too much. Yeah. Feature overload. Yes. The complexity creep. You add a slider, then a chat widget, then a social media feed. Every single one of those things adds code that has to be downloaded, slowing everything else down. You have to ask if that fancy feature is actually worth the customers it might be costing you. You have to. So, if we could fix these things, what does that look like in the real world? We need to see that a small speed fix can lead to a big financial gain. Oh, absolutely. I mean, look at the top of Google. The page is ranking number one average of load time of just 1.65 seconds. Speed is performance. So, let's look at some examples that really prove this out. OK. Take vote of phone. They improve their main content load time, their LCP by just 31%.
[8:06]
The result was an 8% increase in sales. 8%. That's a direct line from page speed to revenue. Or look at Renault, the car company. They sped up their site by just one second and conversions went up 13%. That shows the investment has a clear ROI. Gaining a second back really matters. And one more, a big one, recouping. They fixed all three of those core web titles we talked about, the result. A 53% increase in revenue per visitor. Wow. And that same principle applies if you're in Lumpok or Santa Maria. Gaining a second means you capture a customer you were losing before. It's that simple. OK. This is so powerful. If you're listening right now and having that sinking feeling that your site might be one of the slow ones, what can you do right now to find out? Google gives you the tool for free. This is the moment to literally pause, open a new tab, and check. Where do they go? Just go to page speed.web.dev. That's it. It's Google's own tool. Big speed.web.dev. And once you put your website in, what are you looking for? You'll see a big report, but you want to find the core web vital scores. They use traffic light colors. Green is good. You're passing orange. Orange means you really need to make improvements. You're definitely leaving money on the table. And red. Well, red means your site speed is actively costing you business. It is your biggest problem. So that really wraps up the problem. Speed isn't just a tech thing. It's a core business metric. So the next question is obvious. How do you actually get a website that passes these tests? Well, you have to build for speed from the very beginning. You can't just bolt it on later. You need an architecture that avoids all those problems we just talked about. And that is really the UGRO.Pro difference. We address every single one of those issues by default. Our whole process is built on modern, optimized code. No bloated page builders. No slow databases. And we handle all that optimization for you. You upload a photo and our system automatically compresses it and serves it up in a fast modern format like WebP.
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So your LCP score is always in the green. The end result is a professional website that doesn't just look great. It's lightning fast. It passes Google's core web vitals tests right out of the box. So it's ready for every customer, whether they're on fast internet in Santa Maria or spotty cell service on the 101. And since we're right here in a row, Grande and AG, we handle all of it. The hosting, the security, the updates. You can just focus on your business, not on trying to figure out WebP compression. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At UGRO.Pro, we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update for ever all for just $70.00 a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract, and it is strictly month to month so there is zero risk. We're local here in AG and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to UGRO.Pro right now and we'll design three custom mockups for your business, completely free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening and keep growing.