“Everything starts with a search. The search engine determines what appears on your screen,” Laszlo Horvath, president and founder of Active Media, explained at NAJ’s DigMe Summit last week in Philadelphia. “Your primary source of new discoveries and leads should come from a search engine. You need to find people who are interested in your type of differentiated offering.”

Billed as “Need for Speed! Five Factors that can Impact Your Website’s Load Time … and what you can do about it—Soon!” the fast-paced presentation by Horvath detailed his points in a manner that underscored his emphasis on the need for speed. 

1. Google pushes sluggish loaders deeper down in search rankings, risky because “visitors will go to another search engine.”
2. “You are dead cold at four seconds” in search. Add a maximum of two seconds more for mobile devices.
3. 40 percent of searches are abandoned if load time exceeds 3 seconds.
4. Once abandoned, 79 percent of online shoppers do not return to a slow-loading site.
5. Amazon estimates 1 percent in revenue is lost for every 100 milliseconds of site load delay.

What are the biggest causes for sluggish load times? 

1. Oversized images
2. Page compression
3. No content delivery network
4. Code is not optimized
5. Multiple re-directs
6. Slow server

How Can You Speed up your Website? At little or no cost? 

1. Google’s Page Speed Insights
2. YSlow from Yahoo.
3. Pingdom’s speed checker (see tools.pingdom.com)