Can the speed of your website really have that much of an effect on your sales? Even if your site isn’t loading too slowly, can it still be improved? And how does Google factor into all of this? You might be surprised.
According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.
For example: Ancestory.com recorded a significant, 7% rise in conversions after decreasing the average render time of web pages by 68 percent.
This means you’re not just losing conversions from visitors currently on your site, but that loss is magnified to their friends and colleagues as well. The end result – lots of potential sales down the drain because of a few seconds difference.
The term page speed essentially refers to the length of time at which web pages or media content is downloaded from website hosting servers and displayed onto the requesting web browser. Page load time is the duration between clicking the link and displaying the entire content from the web page on the requesting browser.
By now, most search marketers know that Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. SEO professionals feel the pressure because page speed is a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Compounding that is the recommendation by Google to have a mobile optimized site that renders above-the-fold content in one second or less.
Based on the feedback of 1,048 online shoppers, Forrester Consulting listed a number of key findings and facts regarding the expectations that clients have about the speed and loading times of websites and online stores.
In a study conducted by Geoff Kenyon way back in 2011, he determined these standards for comparing your website speed against the rest of the Web:
if your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web;
if your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web;
if your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web;
if your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web
Amazon has discovered that for every one second delay, conversions dropped by 7%. If you sell $100k per day, that’s an annual loss of $2.5m. Walmart has found that it gains 1% revenue increase for every 100ms of improvement.
These giants have upped their game by just optimizing their websites for speed. It’s not just their products, nor their brand authority ⎯ by being considerate of people’s dwindling patience, they have made their customers happy with a good, fast website.
What Causes A Website To Slow Down?
This question has undoubtedly troubled the minds of many website owners. In reality, there are a lot of issues which can slow your website down. Some of the most common ones? Slow logic app performances, poorly performing database queries, routing issues, too much traffic, lacking memory capacity or a flagrant mismatch between the size of your website and the way in which it is hosted. It’s always a good idea to analyze these problems thoroughly. It will be a lot easier to fix your performance issues once you have properly identified them!
Conclusion
The research tells the story: in this day and age slow websites are bad news! A slow site, which takes four seconds or more to load, could cost you thousands of visitors and conversions. If you have an online store, the aforementioned could equal losing a big heap of money. The good news is that there are a lot of ways to give your site a speed boost. We can help you speed up your site.
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