Does the Speed of My Small Law Firm Website Really Matter?

February 6, 2018

A one second delay in a page’s load time means 11% less page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com and reported by Kissmetrics,

  • 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less
  • 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
  • If an ecommerce website is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

The average loading time for 26,000 websites that Hubspot analyzed was 3.9 seconds. In a space as highly competitive as the internet, the 1.9 seconds could be the difference between closing a sale and having someone use a competitor. Even online retail giant Amazon found a 1% increase in their revenue for every 100 milliseconds (1/10th of a second) of improvement to their website speed.

Google found that increasing their search results to 30/page (vs 10) resulted in a 0.5 second increase in page load - which in turn created a 20% decrease in page views to that test group.

So what can you do to speed up your small law firm website?

  • Compress web pages and assets
  • Optimize code to reduce server load and response times
  • Minify external files (CSS, JS, etc.)
  • Minimize the number of HTTP requests
  • Enable browser caching (smartly)
  • Optimize images
  • Reduce redirects
  • Remove or reduce plugins
  • Use asynchronous loading techniques

There’s a lot written about optimizing websites: Here’s a lot more detail on the list above; Official Google documentation is here; and this is a good infographic from Kissmetrics!

Is your website slow? Find out using Google's PageSpeed Insights. It's a free and on-demand analysis that will give you specific recommendations to fix issues.

Have additional questions? Contact us. No pressure - we’re happy to help!

-Todd & the AttyHub Team