Did you know that the speed of your firm’s website plays a major role in whether or not a user will remain on your site, or even if your website will show up in search results at all? If you haven’t tested the load speed of your legal website, you could be missing out on dozens of potential claimants through inbound marketing.
Users Will Leave Your Website
The longer your website takes to load, the more likely users are to leave and find another legal resource online. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of users leave once a page takes longer than three seconds to load, and the drop-offs continue from there as wait time increases. Once your page takes six seconds or more to load, you’ve lost nearly there of every four visitors.
It’s even worse for users on cell phones. Google reports that more than half of mobile web users exit a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Users expect the same web loading speed for mobile as they do desktop computers, even though there’s usually a large discrepancy between devices’ processing ability.
Google’s Always Watching
Google always pushes for faster page loading times for the sake of users. In an attempt to help users load faster pages, it launched Google AMP, which are accelerated mobile web pages. Additionally, Google announced that in July 2018, sites with slow loading times will be penalized on mobile search results.
What does this mean for your firm? If your firm’s website is loading at a slower speed than a competing firm in your area, your competitor may show up higher position on search results than you. The vast majority of clicks to organic (unpaid) search results go to the first three search results, meaning you could be missing out on hundreds of visits to your website if just one other law firm has pages that load faster than yours.
So How Can You Increase Your Web Speed?
The first step in determining if you need to increase your firm’s mobile or desktop load time is by actually testing the pages. Google has a PageSpeed Insights tool that allows you to simply enter your firm’s URL to see how quickly the pages load on both desktop and mobile.
PageSpeed Insights also lists suggestions for fixing any speed problems, such as optimizing images or using browser cashing. Any issues pulled by PageSpeed Insights can be forwarded along to whoever manages the back end of your firm’s website.
The challenge with optimizing for organic search and user experience with web page loading time is that the actual process of updating a website is time consuming. If your internal marketing efforts aren’t yielding as many clients as you’d like, consider supplementing your caseload with legal leads. eGenerationMarketing offers Social Security disability, personal injury, workers’ compensation, and employment law leads nationwide. Give us a call at 617.800.0089 to learn more about our products and availability in your area today.
Sources Used:
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-53-of-mobile-users-abandon-sites-that-take-over-3-seconds-to-load/426070/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/