Our lives are getting faster, no doubt about that. We are impatient while waiting in lines and are frustrated when someone doesn’t reply to our text immediately. Fast-paced technology has contributed significantly to our fondness for speed. Research conducted in the 2000s found that people walk about 10% faster than they used to. These people are also more likely to eat faster and talk faster. Another research found that the attention span of humans has decreased significantly in the past 20 years. It isn’t comforting to know that humans have a shorter attention span compared to goldfish.

While faster doesn’t always mean better, there are some areas in life where we expect things to be fast-paced. Take, for example, an e-commerce website. We enjoy shopping online because it is fast and easy. Imagine a situation where you had to type in all your details every time you had to purchase anything? Or if the images on those websites take forever to load? We would probably stop shopping unless the item we are trying to purchase is essential and move on to other things. An idea that was popularized by Mel Robbins’ book ‘5-sec Rule’ is that ‘if you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it.’ Now take a guess why YouTube ads can be skipped in 3 secs?

In today’s digital world, your website is one of the significant faces of your business and helps form a good first impression on the customer. It is important that your website is both aesthetically pleasing and has good functionality. How fast your website loads has tremendous importance in positioning yourself as an industry leader. According to research, 47% of people didn’t want to spend more than 3 seconds for a web page to load, and 40 % of the people could abandon a website completely if that happens. Not only that, but the speed of a website also determines the rankings of a website on Google. For a business to be successful, its website needs significant traffic, which ultimately leads to higher sales and revenue. Ranking higher on popular search engines such as Google and Bing will help that. In the case of e-commerce websites, speed also means high conversions. According to research conducted in 2019, second loading time has the highest negative impact on conversion rates, while a 0-2 second loading time is considered the best for high conversion rates.

For businesses especially, for online businesses to be successful on the web, having a fast website with a shorter loading time is important. A faster website provides the best user experience and helps form a positive brand identity among customers. Businesses that have optimized their websites for today’s fast-paced lifestyle attract customers repeatedly.