If time is money, then delays can leave you penniless. So it follows that a slow internet connection can rob your small business of opportunity. More than an annoyance, it’s a barrier to reaching customers and may be costing you more than you think. Take a look at these ways a slow internet might be killing your business.

Fading Productivity

A SanDisk study reports the average employee wastes one week per year waiting on their company’s network to respond. Imagine the productivity you’re giving up if you have more than one staff member. It can also reduce the morale of employees who are frustrated about not being able to do their job. That can carry over to lowered productivity, even when the system is running smoothly.

Downtime can also increase if you don’t have enough bandwidth to handle the cloud-based apps, live chat tool or video conferencing you may be using. The return you derive from these applications can be overshadowed by the time it takes to use them.

Another consideration is data storage, which also requires larger amounts of bandwidth. A slow internet means it takes longer to access that information. There’s a cost associated with delays in getting the information you need to help customers or to make timely business decisions.

Lost Revenue

Whether you sell online, have a website or link to a landing page from your email, response times are critical. Nearly half of consumers will wait only two seconds for a web page to load. If it takes longer, they tend to move on to another company’s page. In fact, one study reports slow websites created a revenue loss for 61% of businesses surveyed.

Slow loads can also affect where you appear in search results. Google uses site speed as part of its algorithm to rank pages. A poor ranking means fewer people are coming to your website.

Tarnished Customer Service

Customers have come to expect lightning-fast service. Just think of how long you’ll wait on hold when calling a customer service. That expectation is even higher online. Quicksprout reports that just a one-second delay results in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Lower levels of satisfaction mean businesses realize fewer repeat sales and a lower return on customer acquisition costs. It can also result in negative customer reviews which can steer prospective customers away.

When processing a customer’s order, a slow internet can negatively impact the customer relationship from the start. It’s frustrating for customers to hold while you wait for your system to take a credit card payment.

Another pain point happens when your systems aren’t fast enough to sync up with each other. For example, what if you’re confirming a customer order for a particular item only to find out later that your inventory system was late in updating and now it’s out of stock. It’s a difficult customer call to make when you have to inform them you can no longer fulfill the order.

Ramping Up Speed

There are a number of ways you can address a slow internet connection. One solution is to run high-bandwidth programs during nonpeak hours. While that conserves your speeds, it may not give you access to the programs you need, when you need them.

There are also bandwidth management devices that let you prioritize the cloud-based programs that are most important to you. But they don’t address the total bandwidth available and the overall speeds you can achieve.

In an increasing number of locations, a fiber-based connection is becoming a longer-term solution. This technology lets you transmit larger amounts of data faster and more securely. While a fiber option may be more expensive in some cases, the added cost might be offset by avoiding the expense associated with a slower connection.

A slow internet is more than an annoyance for small businesses. It could cost you more that you realize. Consider whether you’ve experienced these issues and if it’s time to consider upgrading your business’ internet connection.