A Slow website can kill user experience and also your conversions. In fact, 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less — and 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds.
This means that if your website takes more than three seconds to load, you lose almost half of your visitors before they even arrive on your site. That alone is a huge blow to your potential conversions. And for the visitors that decide to stick around, your slow load times can deter them from returning in the future. In one survey, 79% of customers said they would not return to a site with poor performance.
In that same survey, 52% of shoppers said that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty and 44% said they tell their friends about poor site experiences. This survey also discovered that a one-second delay can decrease customer satisfaction by about 16%.
Walmart Case Study
One of the best examples of this is Walmart’s improvement in conversions and revenue after increasing their site speed. During their initial analysis, they found that visitors who converted had received pages that loaded two times as fast as the visitors who did not convert.
This showed that the faster a page, the more likely a visitor was to make a purchase.
At the end of their website speed optimization, Walmart reported the following results:
For every one second of improvement, they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions.
For every 100 ms of improvement, they grew incremental revenue by up to 1%.
In another study, the relationship between load times and conversion rates showed a 25% decrease in conversion rates with just one extra second of load time.
It’s clear that putting in the effort to increase your site speed — even by one second — could have a major impact on conversions.
What is a good load time?
Before you start working on your site’s speed, it’s a good idea to set a goal for where you want it to be.
That can be difficult if you aren’t sure what an acceptable page speed is.
According to Google, the best practice is three seconds. Unfortunately, according to its recent benchmark report findings, most sites are nowhere near that.
In an analysis of 900,000 mobile ad landing pages spanning 126 countries, Google found that 70% of the pages analyzed took nearly seven seconds for the visual content above the fold to display.
Of all the industries they included, none had an average even close to their recommended best practice of three seconds.
The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, but 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load.
Plus, as page load time goes from one to ten seconds, the probability of a mobile user bouncing increases by 123%.