Is your website not doing well despite your best efforts? You’ve put your heart and soul into the content, worked hard on great on-page SEO, and you’ve written a thousand guest posts to get traffic. Yet, somehow, you’re still struggling to maintain a steady audience.

It could be a problem with your site’s speed. Slowness is an issue plaguing thousands, if not millions, of websites. Most websites need some form of speed improvement so it’s highly likely that poor speed is afflicting your website too.

Even if you don’t see the effects of slow speeds or you don’t even know your site is slow, you might have a problem. Even three seconds of load time is sometimes enough to undermine everything you do.

Need convincing? Check out the stats.

3 seconds of load time results in 40% of users leaving your site. Sounds excessive? It’s true—site speed has a direct correlation with bouncing (i.e. visitors leaving after only seeing one page).

This is because internet users loathe waiting. There’s nothing more annoying than having to wait forever for a web page to load. When people go on the internet, they want everything to happen almost instantly.

As we’ve said, users despise waiting. Unless you have one-of-a-kind content they can’t find anywhere else, nobody will tolerate long load times.

As a result, 75% of internet users even avoid pages that take over 4 seconds to load. That means you lose three-quarters of recurring visitors over long load times. All things put together, each second of delay reduces your page views by 11%.

If you want to sell products online, a fast website is even more important. Long load times make users worry about the success of transactions, the credibility of your site, and just make for poor customer experience.

Website speed directly correlates with customer satisfaction; each second of delay decreases it by 16%. This invites other nasty drawbacks like a decline in brand loyalty, higher shopping cart abandonment rates, and bad publicity.

Different studies and tests have all come to a similar conclusion. One second of delay equals roughly 7% in transactions. That means with each second of delay, your profits drop by 7%.

It definitely pays off to have a fast website. With Google pushing for faster internet and speed optimization tools getting increasingly advanced, there will be less and less room for slow sites. Websites that load in under two or three seconds will soon become the norm.

That’s why now’s the best time to implement good website speed practices. Combine them with fast website hosting and you’ll have no problems delivering your content to its audience in a matter of moments.

Want more fascinating stats? Check out this infographic: