Funeral Home Website Marketing Tips: Page Speed

Have you seen the action movie Speed (1994), and can you guess what it has in common with funeral home website marketing?

The premise of the beloved blockbuster is this: A hotshot SWAT bomb unit officer gets on a bus. The bus is wired with a bomb; once it gets up to speed, if it drops below 50 mph, the entire thing will blow. Traditional action movie hijinks ensue.

What’s a fictional bus with a huge problem have to do with your funeral home website? It’s all about the speed.

What Is Page Speed?
Page speed refers to how fast your site loads when someone navigates to a page. If you were around during the days of dial-up, you might remember that a page could take a full minute or more to load, including any images.

That’s not even close to acceptable now. People expect pages to load in mere seconds today.

Why Is It Important?
Faster page load speeds are important because the faster the page, typically the more conversions. And, as with the bus in the movie, if you drop below a certain threshold, you can sustain major losses (to your sales and revenue numbers). Here’s why:

• The slower your page loads, the more likely people are to bounce (leave without engaging with your content). A drop in speed from 2.4 seconds to 3.3 seconds can double the bounce rate.
• Even a slight drop in page speed correlates with a drop in conversion rates. Pages that load in around 2.4 seconds have average conversion rates of 1.9 percent. Pages that load in 4.2 seconds or more have average conversion rates of 1 percent or less.
• A drop in page load speed of less than a second can hit your bottom line with a revenue fall of 20 percent or more.

How Do You Check It?
If you want to see where you stand with page speed, you can do so with free online tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights.

You can also use a tool called GTMetrix, which tells you how fast your page is and provides some insight into why it might be slow so you know what to work on.