How Speed Affects Your Website
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Josh Wardini, Community Manager at Webmastersjury |
Creating an e-commerce website has become increasingly easy over the last few decades. Nowadays, all you need is a good platform, and you can create a first-rate store in a matter of hours. You don’t even need to be a web developer—everything happens at a click of a button.
Still, you can’t go into it without knowing what makes a good store. There are a lot of factors that determine a store’s success. A lot of shopping platforms focus on these. A good shopping platform should create stores that are SEO-friendly, user-friendly, and visually appealing.
However, even with all of that, your e-store will probably need some extra optimization. It’s easy for owners of online stores to overlook an important thing or two simply because there are so many things to take care of.
Speed is one important factor that few people address. Even if everything looks fine with your store, things like unoptimized images or too many page elements can hurt page load times.
If you’re wondering why speed matters, the infographic below provides a thorough explanation. Here are the most important highlights:
- 3 seconds of load time means 40% of customers leave your website
- 18% of customers give up on a transaction if a website is slow
- Each second of delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16% and conversions by 7%
It’s obvious that having a fast store is the best policy. If you want a lot of customers, you need a fast site.
If you’re looking for a shopping platform, CS-Cart is one of the few platforms that take speed into account. If you tweak your server properly, you can get 95 Google PageSpeed points—putting your website far above the average.
Of course, no platform can account for everything. You still need a fast hosting provider. If your hosting is slow, no kind of speed optimization helps.
How speed affects your website
Does site speed affect google ranking? Website page loading time is vital in today’s user experience. Even a fraction of a second makes a huge difference to search rankings, customer satisfaction, conversions, and sales.
How? Find the answers in the infographic below!
HOW SPEED AFFECTS SHOPPING HABITS
Let’s see the correlation between page load speed and bounce rate.
BOUNCE RATE INCREASE
39% of people will leave a website if images load too long or don’t load at all.
Slow website is the top reason for 51% of the US online customers to abandon a purchase.
74% of users will leave a website if it doesn’t load on their smartphone after 5 sec.
REVENUE DROP
$18 BILLION per year is the total cost of abandoned shopping carts for online retailers.
NEGATIVE PUBLICITY
44% of customers will tell their friends about a bad experience online.
CUSTOMER LOYALTY
52% of customers cite that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.
A 1-sec delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.
PAGE TRAFFIC DROP
A lag time of 0.4 seconds can result in a decrease of 0.44% traffic.
A 1 sec delay in page load time means an 11% decline in page views.
An extra 0.5 seconds in each search page generation would cause traffic to drop by 20%
WHAT IS AFFECTED?
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Visitors spend 1% of their time checking banner content if a page takes more than 8 sec to load.
75% of users won’t return to a webpage if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.
79% of users are less likely to buy from the site again if they are dissatisfied with website performance.
EFFECTS ON THE INDUSTRY
CASE STUDY
AliExpress reduced load time for their pages by 36% and recorded a 10.5% increase in orders and a 27% increase in conversions for new customers.
CHECKOUT RATE
For 46% of online buyers, checkout speed is the No.1 factor that decides if they will come back to the site.
44% of online customers worry about the success of the transaction when a checkout page takes too long.
EFFECTS ON THE INDUSTRY
CASE STUDY
For every 0.1 sec decrease in checkout page load speed, Mobify’s customers saw a 1.55% lift in session-based conversion.
REVENUE
64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will shop somewhere else next time.
43% of buyers will go to a competitor’s site next time if they’re faced with a negative mobile shopping experience.
Amazon did a test that showed they would lose $1.6B/year if the speed slowed down by just 1 sec.
EFFECTS ON THE INDUSTRY
CASE STUDY
2 seconds delay in Bing led to a 4.3% loss in revenue per visitor and a 3.75% reduction in clicks.
The Trainline reduced latency by 0.3s across their funnel. This resulted in an extra £8M/year increase in revenue.
SEO
Now, let’s see how much does site speed affects SEO.
Google’s research showed that the chance of a bounce increased 32% when the page load time went from 1s to 3s.
When the page load goes from 1s to 5s, the chance increases to 90%.
If your site takes up to 10 sec to load, the chance of a bounce increases to 123%.
Users visit 8.9 pages when page load time is 2 sec, and 3.3 pages when page load time is 8 sec.
EFFECTS ON THE INDUSTRY
CASE STUDY
SmartFurniture.com sped up the site, which led to 20% increase in organic search traffic.
Microsoft’s 0.4s delay can result in a reduced query volume of 0.21%.
ABANDONMENT
40% of customers abandon a website that takes more than 3 sec to load.
A 2-second loading delay during a transaction can result in abandonment rates of up to 87%
18% of customers will abandon their transactions if the pages are too slow.
EFFECTS ON THE INDUSTRY
CASE STUDY
Yahoo! Reduced their page load time by 0.4 sec, which resulted in a traffic increase by 9%.
SITE SPEED AND CONVERSION RATE
A 1-sec delay in page response can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.
The average peak load time for conversions is 2 sec, which is faster than millions of websites.
EFFECTS ON THE INDUSTRY
CASE STUDY
For every 1 second of improvement, Walmart experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions.
Ancestory.com improved the render time of web pages by 68%, reduced page bloat by 46%, and load time by 64% which resulted in a 7% rise in conversions.
For every 0.1 seconds of improvement, Walmart grew incremental revenue by up to 1%.
INTERESTING FACT
If Google increased its page load time by 0.5 seconds, they’d get 25% fewer searches.
FUN FACT
Customers remember online loading time as being 35% longer than they actually are.
MOBILE VS DESKTOP
The mobile landing page fully loads in 22 sec in average.
The average browser load time in the USA is 9.3 sec.
53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 secs to load.
50% of users are likely to abandon a site if it doesn’t load within 2 sec.
Mobile sites that load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue.
A 1-sec delay could potentially cost $2.5M/year in lost sales if an e-commerce site is making $100K/day.
MOBILE VS. DESKTOP EXPECTATIONS
12% of users expect their phone loading to be faster than their desktop.
21% of users expect their phone loading to be equal with their desktop.
25% of users expect their phone loading to be as fast as their desktop.
30% of users expect loading to be slower on their phones.
INTERESTING FACT
If Amazon increased its page load time by 0.1 seconds, they’d lose 1% of their sales.
CUSTOMER EXPECTATION
64% of smartphone users expect pages to load in <4 seconds.
More useful eCommerce articles and infographics are coming your way. Follow CS-Cart on Facebook and Twitter not to miss them!
Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.