5 Reasons a Slow Website Is Costing You Therapy Clients
Do you know that a slow website can cost you clients? You have hired a website designer to build a beautiful private practice website, but the website is taking too long time to load. This can be a matter of grave concern. Statistics by browserstack reports that 40% of people leave the website if the website does not load within 3 seconds. That is a huge number effectively meaning 4 out of 10 potential clients leaving without interacting.
There are various tools available which you can use to check if your website is slow or not? The most common ones are PageSpeed Insights by Google, Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Uptrends website speed test tool. These tools will help you in determining your website’s speed in real time. I have compiled the list of website speed testing tool here – 4 tools to check private practice website speed. You can check them for more information.
In this post, I have listed down 5 major reasons of a slow website costing you therapy clients.
Reason #1: First Impressions Are Instant
There is a common phrase that “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. The same phrase applies to your website. If your private practice website will be slow, takes more than 3 seconds to load properly, then the incoming visitor will not have a good impression about your website and leave.
Keep in mind that the incoming visitor is not some ordinary visitor just checking your website. She/He is a potential client. If She/He will have to wait to know about you, to learn about your qualification, to decide if you are a good fit for them, they will move on to the next website, leaving you with a loss of a to be client.
In short, a laggy website doesn’t look trustworthy ultimately sending a bad impression to the end user.
Reason #2: Higher Bounce Rate
As I already said, the user is on your website to know about you, to get the contact details. But if the website will load slow, the user will be unable to get the desired information, gets frustrated, and will move on to some another website which is basically your competitor, increasing your website bounce rate.
If you are unfamiliar with bounce rate, it is the percentage of visitors who leave your website only after visiting a single page. Semrush, a popular SEO tool says that bounce rate of 40% or lower is good.
So a higher bounce rate means low client enquiries.
Reason #3: You’re Invisible in Google
The third reason is directly related to the second reason I just talked about above. If you have a slow website, the user will spend less time on your website which will increase your bounce rate. This increased bounce rate will send a signal to Google and search engines that visiting users to your website are not satisfied with the website and are moving to next website to find the information.
This will in turn activate the search algorithm to de-rank your private practice website from it’s initial position. So, if you are ranking on page number 1 and algorithm detects that user are leaving your website without spending much time or visiting another page of your website, they will de-rank you and push you behind many pages.
A slow loading website impacts your SEO efforts whereas a fast loading website helps in SEO.
Reason #4: Low Conversion Rates
When you have a website which is not loading properly, visitors are finding it hard to navigate on your website, get the contact details, this will impact your conversion rates. In today’s internet age where data is cheap and internet speed is fast, users expect that the website they are visiting should also loads fast. They don’t have the time or patience to remain on the website which is loading in parts.
So, if your website is not loading within a second or say within 3 seconds, there are high chances that they will leave your website, making a direct impact on your conversion rates.
Reason #5: It Reflects Poorly on Your Practice
Like I said above, today is the age of fast internet. Everyone has access to modern devices which let’s users to access websites easily without any hassle. That being said the users in turn expect that online websites that they visit should also look modern, elegant, and fast loading.
So, if your website will be lagging, give errors while loading, it will send a poor impression on your practice too. They may assume that if your website is not up-to today’s internet level, how should the private practice be. Not a good impression to have as a private practitioner.
Conclusion
As someone rightly said “Time is money”, so having a website which loads fast, satisfies user intent is utmost necessary. This is a myth that slow therapist website will work. You can not afford to lose clients just because of a slow website. So if you have a slow website don’t sit on it. Improve its speed. The lower the better. There are various techniques and methods which you can use to speed up a slow private practice website. You can read my article 7 ways to instantly speed up a private practice therapy website to instantly decrease the website loading time of your website.
