It’s likely that if we asked you to describe a successful digital marketing campaign, you’d include the importance of careful design, precise ad targeting, and the advantages of conversion optimization. But if you haven’t thought about page performance, all the attention you paid to the design of your website and landing pages could be for naught. More than half of your visitors will abandon your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Another way of saying this is that you are losing potential customers and money for every second of frustration you cause them by having a slow loading page.
Page load times affect your search engine rankings, which in turn affects your bottom line. The search engine revealed that mobile search rankings would be affected more heavily by speed in July of this year. For this reason, you should prioritise making your landing pages and other web pages load as quickly as possible so that they can rank high in the SERP (paid or search).
We’ve compiled seven figures about page speed to illustrate why it’s crucial. We’re currently conducting our own study in this area, but in the meanwhile, you can use the information below to make the case for increasing the speed of your landing pages and learn why slow and steady doesn’t win the digital marketing race.
One of the most frustrating aspects of mobile web browsing, according to 46% of users, is having to wait for websites to load:
There are several elements to think about while designing a landing page (layout, content hierarchy, visuals, CTA, and more). But, page performance should also be prioritised, as Google recommends. Since visitors’ impatience has only increased since the 2015 survey referenced above, you should give load time (across all devices) the same weight as more conventional design factors. If you see that some of your images are getting close to being too large, you should compress them. With a data rate over 800kb, you’re really pushing your luck.
2-The typical waiting time for a mobile landing page to load is 15.3 seconds:
And that’s with fake 4G! Nevertheless, that only takes mobile into account; in general, desktop browsers allow pages to load far more quickly. For instance, the newest data from Pingdom shows that the average web page loads in 3.21 seconds. In order to maximise conversion rates, a three-second load time is the bare minimum.
Research conducted by Akamai found that the optimal mobile load time for a client was 2.4 seconds, with a peak mobile conversion rate of 1.9% over the course of a month. Instead, when the client’s site took 4.2 seconds to load, the average conversion rate fell below 1%.
Final goal times between 2.4% and 3% on mobile and desktop devices are recommended.
3-Sites with a five-second load time (as opposed to a nineteenth-second one) have 70% longer average sessions:
The longer visitors stay on your website, the more time they have to read your material and make a decision, therefore you should strive for at least five seconds. You put in a lot of time and effort to create compelling offers; therefore, it is in your best interest to keep visitors on your landing pages by ensuring that they load quickly enough for them to view (and understand) your important messaging.
4-If your page takes an extra 100 milliseconds to load, you could lose 7 percent of your conversions:
Another time-is-money statistic is provided by Akamai, which mirrors a Google finding that conversions decrease by 12% for every second of load time. There was a 70% drop in conversion rates over a one second period, the study found in 2017! According to Mobify’s research on the effects of homepage load time, not only does a slow website cause a loss of visitors, but it also causes a loss of revenue. According to data from the online retailer’s 2016 Q2 Mobile Insights Report, a one-tenth of a second improvement in load time translated to a 1.11% boost in session-based conversion.
As Pinterest’s move to redesign their pages for performance shows, however, page speed is an issue for many businesses, not just those who provide tangible goods or services. The waiting time on the sharing platform was cut in half, which led to a 15 percent boost in both organic search traffic and new user registrations.
5-Over three-quarters (73%), in fact, have experienced websites that take too long to load on their mobile devices:
Okay, look, we’ve all been there. Many websites still don’t load quickly enough, despite the fact that visitors are continually being offered better speeds (through telecom commercials, internet providers, etc.). That’s not good for tourists, but it could work to your advantage if you want to stand out. According to SEMrush, “if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it’s faster than nearly 75% of the web.” Consider this an opening to make a competitive move in your industry by having a website and landing pages that load faster than the competition. This is the time to put speed first.
6-If a website has poor performance, 79 percent of customers won’t shop there again:
The overall performance of a website, including its load time and responsiveness, is crucial to the success of any e-commerce venture. This statistic demonstrates how something as simple as a slow-loading site may drive people away, sometimes permanently.
7-The average bounce rate is 9% for sites that load in under two seconds and rises to 38% for pages that take more than five seconds to load:
If your website has a high bounce rate, that means that users are landing on the page they are seeing and then leaving without exploring the rest of the site. Besides, who can say how much of it there is? This could indicate that they are not interested in taking the next step recommended by your call to action (CTA) or otherwise discovering your unique selling proposition (USP).
When someone leaves your landing page, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly why they did so—poor audience targeting? Intriguing material? Not enough multimedia? And if you notice a correlation between page speed and bounce rate, you may start to question the quality of your writing. Save yourself some time (and confusion) by prioritizing page speed via solutions like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Now, getting back to our initial question, what is the single most crucial factor to think about when developing a digital marketing strategy? If you think about all of these numbers, maybe you’ll start to see things differently. Load time is becoming increasingly important (for both mobile and desktop settings), and as a result, page speed is becoming increasingly important to the success of your online strategy—so you’d better get moving!