Why do fast sites make more money? Because of nobody like a slow website. 14% of your audience will start shopping at another site if your page loads are slow, and 23% will simply stop the shopping experience or walk away from the computer. That has a huge affect on your business bottom line.
Getting your websites, images, and videos to load quickly is an absolute necessity for inbound marketing success. Average e-commerce websites can take 7 seconds to load, far higher than the ideal page load time of 3 seconds or less.
In this article, we will check how page load time affects your site revenue and also the importance of even just one second in page loading.
Slow website and your business bottom line
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, and you will realize:
PEOPLE HATE WAITING
They get even MORE impatient when it comes to website speed. Want proof? Have a look at the Financial Times Case study:
“The speed of the site negatively impacts a user’s session depth, no matter how small the delay…The data suggests, both in terms of user experience and financial impact, that there are clear and highly valued benefits in making the site even faster. From this research we’ve chosen to invest even more time in making every aspect of the new FT.com website even faster over the coming months “
They add a 5-second delay to each page load time. Notable facts they found:
- The first-second delay resulted in a 4.9% drop in the number of articles a visitor read
- The three-second delay resulted in a 7.9% drop
- Visitors read less when delays occurred
Web page load time not only impacts user engagement with content but also impacts the shopping cart, and thus your site conversion rate.
“1 out of 5 online shoppers will abandon their cart because the transaction process was too slow.”
Look put these stats on some numbers:
- Effect on Sale: 79% of customers who report dissatisfaction with website performance are less likely to buy from that same site again.
- Conversion: 1 second delay means a 7% reduction in conversions
- Speed Affects Revenue: If your site makes $100,000/month, a one second improvement in page speed brings $7,000 month
Facebook took notice of the 3-second abandonment statistic and declared in August 2017 that information feed updates with slow-loading links will be shown reduced in the newsfeed:
“With this update, we’ll soon take into account the estimated load time of a webpage that someone clicks to from any link in News Feed on the mobile app. Factors such as the person’s current network connection and the general speed of the corresponding webpage will be considered. If signals indicate the webpage will load quickly, the link to that webpage might appear higher in your feed.”
Page load time affects SEO
Google will not rank your website or sometimes penalize it if there’s any indication of poor user experience, including slow page load time – whereas faster sites get an SEO boost, according to Google Webmaster Blog:
“…faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”
Therefore, having a faster site will improve your SEO rankings and the higher your web page in the Google search result, which we all know affects revenue.
Page load affects your reputation
Companies aren’t just losing money due to slow loading of a website – a slow homepage may also harm your brand’s reputation.
According to Customer research lab.
“66% of customers said website performance influences their impression of the company and 33 percent of customers have a negative impression of a company with a poor performing website. “
The results were clear—speed matters! The key study findings are highlighted below:
- 35% are less likely to purchase a product if the website performance is poor
- 66% say website performance influences their impression of the firm
- 33% have possessed a negative impact on a firm with a poor performing website
Growing use of mobile
It’s no surprise that more search traffic than ever before is coming to websites from mobile devices and overtaking desktop searches. Page load time can either make or break the user experience with your website.
According to Shopify studies,
“47% of consumers expect to wait no longer than two seconds for a web page to load. After that, consumer tolerance wears and 40% of visitors will abandon a web page if it doesn’t load in less than three seconds”
By improving a mobile site’s page speed from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, “conversion rate could increase by 74%.”
Here’s some more stats:
- 58% of all mobile customers expect sites to render as quickly as their home computers.
- 64% of all smartphone users anticipate pages to load in under 4 seconds.
- 74% of people will leave a mobile website which requires over 5 seconds to load.
- 61% of consumers will abandon a mobile site if they don’t find what they’re looking for right away.
Importance of seconds in page speed
Improving page loading time with a couple of seconds can make a massive impact on your business.
- Mozilla saw 60 million more downloads each year by making their webpage 2.2 seconds faster.
- Amazon calculated that webpage load slowdown of just one second could price it $1.6 billion in revenue annually
- Bing discovered that a 2-second delay in page loading time led to a 1.8% drop off in queries, a 3.75% reduction in clicks, over a 4% reduction in satisfaction and a 4.3% reduction in revenue per visitor.
- Shopzilla improved site speed from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds, which increased earnings by 12% and page views from 25%.
Don’t forget about milliseconds
Even by a few hundred milliseconds, can affect your business bottom line. Here are some real-life examples:
- Walmart and Amazon both observed a 1% increase in earnings for every 100 milliseconds of improved webpage speed.
- Yahoo saw a 9% increase in traffic to every 400 milliseconds of webpage speed improvement.
- Google loses 20% of their traffic for every additional 100 milliseconds it takes for a page to load.
Summing up
Improving page loading speed is a tangible way to enhance the user experience for businesses both big and small. It is easy to check pages and make minor tweaks to coding, server config, or optimization features to see a significant improvement in loading time.
Page load speed is not a mythical beast that cannot be slain. It is a real factor that can be easily tackled. So what are you waiting for?
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