Most users can recall a time when they’ve been frustrated at how slow a website was loading. Website performance is impacted by a number of factors including the amount of content on a page, the size of any loaded images, the layout of the page, and even how physically distant the server hosting the website is from the person trying to access it. Site and page load speed is a highly important factor for user satisfaction, engagement, and search engine optimization. Here are some of the impacts of poor website performance, that extend beyond an individual getting slightly annoyed:
- “1 second of load lag time would cost Amazon.com $1.6 billion in sales per year.” -Amazon
- “When load times jump from 1 second to 4 seconds, conversions decline sharply. For every 1 second of improvement, we experience a 2% conversion increase.” –Walmart.
- “A lag time of 400ms results in a decrease of 0.44% traffic – In real terms this amounts to 440 million abandoned sessions/month and a massive loss in advertising revenue for Google.” -Google. Google has become so obsessed with speed that they measure delays in the numbers of lives lost, i.e. by multiplying the time users have wasted by the number of users to determine how many lifetimes have been lost to poor engineering. Google further stated that an extra 0.5 seconds in each search page generation would cause traffic to drop by 20%.
- 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from the same website again.
- 52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading time is important to their site loyalty.
- A 1 second delay (or 3 seconds of waiting) decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%.
- 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online.
Some sources include:
Website performance is critical. The impact to your business extends far beyond minor annoyance.
