The Mind Blowing Impact of Website Speed

Published: December 27, 2020 Updated: August 19, 2023

Website speed is by far the most important component of your website.

Website visitors care about site/page loading speed more than any other aspect of your website, as I’ve stated previously. It is infinitely more important than design, features, branding, or anything else

Unfortunately, the average site speed across the internet is escalating quickly. The average site loads in a whopping 7+ seconds according to popular speed testing tool GTmetrix. This is despite the fact that site speed is an increasingly more important consideration for search engine rankings.

Lost visitors diminish the effectiveness and impact of marketing expenditure, resulting in businesses wasting thousands of dollars monthly. That doesn’t even take into account the untold value of the lost opportunity. Quality control pays. Without quality management, businesses literally don’t know what and who they might be losing. Fast page loading leads to better conversion rates.

Research has consistently shown that site speed heavily impacts search engine optimization, user engagement, conversion rates, sales, and revenue.

Impact on User Attitude and Behavior

47% of users want a page to load in under two seconds.
79% of online shoppers dissatisfied with site performance are less likely to purchase from the same website again.
52% of shoppers state that fast page load time is important in terms of their site loyalty.
40% of users abandon sites taking over three seconds to load.

Mobile visitors are even less forgiving:

53% of mobile users tend to abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
88% of mobile consumers are not likely to return to a website after a bad experience.
4 in ten Americans give up accessing a mobile site that doesn’t load in three seconds.

Impact on Conversion Rates

According to Amazon’s calculations, a slowdown in page-load of just one second might translate to a $1.6 billion loss in sales annually.
Google estimates that by slowing down its search results by a mere four-tenths of a second, they could be losing 8 million searches daily–which means Google would be serving millions of fewer adverts.
It is estimated that a 1-second delay in page response could lead to a 7% reduction in conversion rates. For example, for every 1 second of improvement, Walmart experienced up to a 2% boost in conversions.

Impact on Page Abandonment

A delay of four seconds in page response can lead to a 25% abandonment rate.
Often, a 10-second delay will have users leaving a website immediately.
Over 75% of online consumers go for a rival site rather than suffer delays during peak traffic times.

Impact on Revenue and Sales

Most companies and businesses aren’t aware of the revenue falling through the cracks because of website quality issues such as a slow loading page. Online retailers could be losing out as much as £1.73bn annually.

For an e-commerce site that makes $100,000 daily, a 1-second page delay might potentially cost them a loss of $2.5 million annually.
Amazon estimates that a 1 second lag in load time would cost them $1.6 billion annually in sales.
With faster page load times, companies stand to gain up to 26% in their marketing spend effectiveness.
For every 100 ms of improvement, Walmart saw incremental revenue growth of up to 1%.

Most websites have an average load time of about 8-11 seconds. While that might seem short, and not too long, the fact is that every second lost is actually costing your business valuable visitors; potential customers and sales/revenue.

The general impact of a range of other website issues could be as substantial as the page load issues analyzed above. These include broken pages, duplicative content, missing SSL encryption, and overly long click paths, among many others. When aggregated, the price of ignoring such factors goes beyond squandered marketing money; businesses pay the cost in terms of lost opportunity.

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