Fast loading times are important for every online business. If WordPress is slow, it costs conversions and ultimately money. We explain what effects poor performance can have and what it has to do with SEO.

The big online retailers recognized this early on: The loading time of their stores has a direct impact on sales. In 2012, Amazon calculated that a decrease in loading time of one second would mean 1.6 billion dollars in lost sales.

The best-known figures on this issue come from a Walmart experiment, the results of which were published in 2012. Walmart had found that its website sometimes loaded extremely slowly - in some cases it even took 24 seconds to display product pages. To find out what effects this had, the Americans compared two groups: One was presented with a significantly faster version of the website, the other had to struggle with the slow version. The results speak for themselves.

WordPress slow? Generate up to 10 percent more sales in one second

Every tenth of a second saved in loading time brought the Americans a whopping one percent increase in sales; every second that can be saved theoretically means around 10 percent more sales.

Based on these findings, our colleagues at Kissmetrics have compiled more recent data and come to the conclusion that the relevance of page loading speed has even increased. This is because 19 percent of users leave a website that takes five seconds or longer to load. In addition, more than half of users expect websites to load at most a little slower on their mobile device than on their PC, but not significantly slower.

If a website is just one second slower than the average, this can cost seven percent in conversions. For a store that generates 100 euros in sales per day, this means up to 25,000 euros in lost sales per year.

And all because of a slow website! So when it comes to performance, it's worth taking a very close look.

WordPress slow? Increase conversions by a whopping 2% in just one second

In addition to a direct correlation between page load speed and sales, the Walmart team also found an influence on overall conversions: every second resulted in an average increase of two percent in the conversion rate. This value can make the difference between the existence or demise of any store and also has an influence on the Google ranking.

If WordPress is slow, users bounce faster

The Walmart team found a direct correlation between the bounce rate and the performance of the website. In other words: If WordPress is slow, users will leave your website more quickly and spend less time surfing it.

All three factors - loading speed, bounce rate and interaction behavior - have an impact on your Google ranking. If WordPress is slow, this has a direct and indirect influence on your position in the search results.

Your website therefore benefits threefold from a short loading time: it avoids conversion and sales losses, ensures potentially better interaction and improves the Google ranking.

Conclusion: Whether WordPress is slow is decided in your head, not on paper

When it comes to WordPress performance, you can't just rely on bare figures. All research results are average values and only give an indication of what WordPress performance optimization can ultimately achieve. The bottom line is to ensure that you have the feeling of surfing a fast website. Improving the loading time by half a second is therefore of little use if the user does not notice this difference.

Therefore, when optimizing, it is important to pay particular attention to improving the customer experience and not just the speed test result. But before you start optimizing, you should first understand why WordPress is slow. Three factors play a role here: the technical performance of the server, the scope of the hosting plan and the site structure.

In the upcoming posts in our performance section, we will share this knowledge with you and show you what you can do with it. We'll explain what makes WordPress slow, how to identify the key bottlenecks, what optimization steps you can take and how to ensure that your site performance remains consistently high.