Over the last 10 years, many web technologies have made their appearance and it’s quite tempting to have a lot of bells & whistles crammed onto your homepage.
How much difference can another second or two of load time make right?
The answer is quite simple: page load times make a huge difference.
Let’s talk about why…
#1: Search Engine Rankings
This is #1 for a reason. Because without proper search engine rankings, your website may never get a lot of visitors. Without visitors your sales will be OK at best. Back in 2010 Google announced that page load times were now a factor in ranking websites. And then in 2017 they announced that load times of both desktop and mobile would further determine your search rankings. And every year since, the importance of page load times has increased.
#2: Conversion Rate
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a particular action, like buying a product or hopping on to your mailing list for example. If someone happens to abandon your site altogether after a few seconds, there’s no chance they’ll do any of these. In fact, there’s little chance they’ll ever come back.
Many businesses have discovered that improving page load times by just half a second or so was all that was needed to boost their conversion rate. One of those businesses was Walmart. They found that a one second improvement in load time increased conversions by 2 percent. When you’re Walmart, 2 percent translates to a lot of revenue in sales.
Additional reports…
#3: Abandonment Rate
Your visitors will only do one of two things. If they aren’t converting, they’re abandoning.
Most people today have access to high speed internet. As such, we expect speed. Research shows that at least 10% of visitors will only wait 2 seconds maximum before abandoning a site. Another 2 seconds and that increases to 25% (according to Kissmetrics). And a study done by BBC found that for every second thereafter, you keep losing another 10%.
#4: Return Rate
Some may abandon, but come back at a later time. This refers to your return rate. According to the latest research, approximately 75% of visitors will never come back to a site where they’ve experienced long page load times… approximately 3 to 4 seconds. This can have a serious compound effect on your conversion rate.
Not only that, visitors who’ve had a bad experience are much more likely to tell friends and family about that, than visitors who’ve had a good experience. Think about that.
Furthermore, other websites in your industry are far less likely to want to link to your site because of the load times. Simply put, you start losing visitors, sales, credibility and referrals.
#5: The number of mobile users is increasing… rapidly
As of 2014 (and that was a while ago), no less that 94% of internet users living in the Middle East accessed the internet from their mobile devices. And this isn’t happening in just the Middle East… this is a worldwide trend.
A report from Statista showed that in the second quarter of 2020, mobile users accounted for over 51% of all web traffic on the planet – and this figure doesn’t even include tablets.
We all want information on the go, and we want it immediately.
After all, we’re a very powerful buying force. In 2015 (that was a while ago too), nearly 50% of all online purchases were done on a mobile device. And that percentage is only growing year over year.
#6: Long Term Effects
The longer your long page load time issues persist, the more you scare away potential customers and your search rankings continue to dwindle. After just 5 seconds of waiting, you’ve lost 50% of your visitors. And it doesn’t stop there. Think about how many pages your visitors need to go through in order to buy a product or sign up for a service.
The number of people who actually have the patience to make it all the way through will be just a small fraction of your daily visitors. And this compounds month over month, year over year.
