Video Marketing Blog - Strategy, Inbound, Agency Info

Why Page Load Speed Matters for Healthcare Marketing

Written by Matt Brannon | November 3, 2016

Can you stand to lose over a third of your healthcare website visitors? When your website takes over 3 seconds to load, you stand to lose potential traffic. Website visitors will jump to a competitor’s site when a site has slow page loads and may stop "shopping" altogether or walk away from their device. Keep your healthcare prospects tuned in with the briefest of page loading times. Understand how page load speed can impact your healthcare marketing efforts.

Increase Usage

The former head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, wrote about site speed as an important signal to determine search ranking. He wrote about the difference page loading speed can have on the user experience and search rankings:

“Also take a step back for a minute and consider the intent of this change: a faster web is great for everyone, but especially for users. Lots of websites have demonstrated that speeding up the user experience results in more usage. So speeding up your website isn’t just something that can affect your search rankings—it’s a fantastic idea for your users.”

Take the steps necessary to improve your page loading time and increase your website’s usage. Some websites need only a few updates to start seeing a positive impact. Those looking to improve their website’s loading speed may want to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test their pages and get useful suggestions for improvement.

Healthcare Marketing Experts Rely on Research

Studies show that users want faster page load speed. Use dissatisfaction increased when delays were artificially introduced changing page load speeds from 500 milliseconds to 2 seconds. Query volume dropped off and left a mark on websites after the test was completed. More than half of users will go to a competitor’s site when they are dissatisfied with a visit. Improving your page load speed is an easy way to attract more healthcare customers and keep them happy. Cutts wrote:

“I would love if SEOs dive into improving website speed, because (unlike a few facets of SEO) decreasing the latency of a website is something that is easily measurable and controllable. A #1 ranking may not always be achievable, but most websites can be made noticeably faster, which can improve ROI and conversion rates.”

Readers of B2B healthcare business websites are searching for information. Remove flashy elements that reduce page load speed and make it easy for users to access needed research and data. Any healthcare business, large or small, can improve their page loading speed, which in turn will affect their ROI and conversion.

Begin Making Changes

Get positive results from changes to embedded features, coding and more. You cannot convert healthcare prospects that bounce from slow loading pages. Healthcare business can make relatively easy changes and measure the impact of faster loading speeds on usage, query volume, and revenue. Share your recent website development updates below or tweet us @gravitydigitalk today.