Time is money. That’s how I would describe the importance of web performance if I had only three words to do it. A famous quote credited to Benjamin Franklin is more relevant than ever. Fortunately, I’m not limited to the number of words and we’ll figure out how slow page load speed can kill your business.
Poor Website Performance Kills UX
Customers expect your website page load in 3 seconds or less. Fast web performance creates a positive first impression of your company and business which is so vital on the Net. 80 % of customers disappointed by your site performance are less likely to visit your page again. You’ll hardly beat a negative first impression.
It can be explained from the psychological point of view. When you visit a site and it loads in 1 sec, what do you think about it? Wow! So fast! It must be professional and reliable. If the speed is low it looks untrustworthy and not cool. Let’s be honest we hate waiting too long. We use the Internet to find quick and immediate answers.
We don’t speak about the popular and well-known sites as people are ready to wait to buy something there. Nevertheless, low web site speed affects big brands too.
If big brands can afford such a delay, small and medium businesses should be fast from the very beginning.
Mobile users expect that your mobile web site speed will be even faster — 1 sec. Taking into account the fact that 49% of website traffic comes from mobile devices and 45% of consumers use mobile devices for shopping, poor site performance becomes a more essential problem. If you can’t satisfy the needs of your clients they’ll simply go to your competitors whose mobile site is faster.
Statistics say that only 25% of mobile websites meet the needs of mobile users. If you’ll boost your mobile web performance you’ll get:
- increased on-page time
- doubled revenue
- reduced cart abandonment rates
- higher ranks on Google
Poor Website Performance Kills Conversion
Your conversion rate is directly proportional to UX. As I said before, 80 % of shoppers won’t return to your website if they are frustrated by your website performance. Here are some more stats for you: 53 % of users leave your site if it takes more than 3 sec to load. You’ll lose half of your potential customers. No visitors — no sales. Pure Math.
mPulse Mobile found out how page load influences conversion rate by their own example:
- Pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds had a 1.9% conversion rate
- At 3.3 seconds, conversion rate was 1.5%
- At 4.2 seconds, conversion rate was less than 1%
- At 5.7+ seconds, conversion rate was 0.6%
Do you remember what I’ve told you about Amazon? 1 extra page load sec will decline annual Amazon’s revenue on 1.6 billion $.
Let’s reinforce it with some more case studies:
- Shopzilla. The faster pages have 7% to 12% more conversion than slower pages.
- Microsoft. 400-millisecond delay can result in reduced query volume of 0.21 %.
- Firefox. Reduced page load by 2.2 sec increased downloads by 15.4 %.
- Google. Increasing latency by 100 and 400 ms reduce daily searches by 0.2 to 0.6 % respectively.
- AutoAnything. Cutting page load in a half leads to increase in sales by 13 % and boosts conversion rate by 9 %.
- Bing. 2-second delay leads to a loss in revenue by 4.3%, click reduction by 3.75 %, 1.8 % drop off in queries.
Low website speed not only reduce your conversion and revenue but also affects the natural growth of your website. If people leave your site due to poor performance your partners won’t link your content back or you can even lose your current newsletter subscribers. It’ll better for you not to mess with page load speed if you want your business to thrive.
Poor Website Performance Kills SEO
Year and year Google says the same thing: “Speed is everything” despite the fact that website speed is a ranking SEO factor since 2010 and the launch of “Speed Update” for mobile devices.
In fact, the Net is full of numerous articles stating that page load doesn’t influence ranking. Some facts there are trustworthy, some of them — not. The thing we know for sure is:
What does it mean? Google won’t pick up your latest content and updates. If your web performance is average you won’t face any SEO problems but if it’s slower, you’ll reach the Google bottom until fixing it.
Wrapping Out
Website performance is all about the user experience. If users are not satisfied with your site due to slow page load speed you’ll just lose them. Losing potential customers means losing conversion and revenue.
Want to Enhance Your Magento Store Performance?
