If a website visitor doesn’t have their needs met, they will abandon the site and move onto the next. For business owners, this is a space that must be prioritised, as losing customers to the competition should not be part of their marketing strategy.
Google looked at mobile page speeds in 2018 and concluded that the average time to load a mobile landing page dropped by 7 seconds. Whilst this seems like good news, research shows it still takes around 15 seconds for a mobile site to load.
In 2019, that is completely unacceptable. 53% of mobile site visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
We’ve created an infographic to highlight the statistics (embed code is at the bottom of the post).
Facts & Statistics
Page speed is one of the most overlooked and yet most important factors in customer attention, retention, and ultimately, converting browsers to buyers. Ensuring that you’re taking measures to increase page speed or reduce lag can be the difference between failure and success.
Mobile Users
According to WeAreSocial, there are over 5 billion mobile users worldwide. For website users and business owners, this is a massive market. Not losing out on mobile website users is an absolute must if you want to stay in the game.
- 73% of mobile internet users have come across a website that was too slow
- 51% of mobile internet users have experienced a website that has either crashed or received an error
- 47% of mobile internet users now expect a website to load within 2 seconds
- 38% of mobile internet users have reported visiting a website that wasn’t available
- The average webpage takes 87.84% longer to load on mobile than it does on desktop
- CMS platforms SquareSpace and Weebly have the best mobile page speed performance
- Wix and WordPress rate poorly in terms of load speed on a mobile device
Desktop Users
In 2018, 52.2% of all internet traffic worldwide was recorded on a mobile phone. However, that still leaves 47.8% of internet traffic coming from other devices including desktop PCs. Although mobile is more popular in 2019, there’s still a large proportion of users to account and cater for.
- Users visit 8.9 pages when a page load time is 2 seconds. This is reduced to 3.3 pages when the load time is 8 seconds
- 44% of customers will tell their friend about a bad online experience
- 56% of people said they’d sacrifice animations on websites in favour of better loading times
- 50% of users said they’ll try to refresh a page at least once when it takes 3 seconds to load
- 22% of users say they’ll close the browser tab when the load time is >3 seconds
- 14% of users say they’ll visit a competitor’s site if the webpage doesn’t load within 3 seconds
- 50.5% of users said they blame their internet connection before blaming the website they’re on for their slow speeds
- 34.2% of users said they would blame a website for poor speeds before blaming anything else 45% of 18-to-24-year-olds say they’ll wait 4-6 seconds on their desktop for a page to load
Conversion Rates
In 2019 it’s imperitive that you make changes and optimise your website. Why? Because improving the number of people you have visiting your website can be better conversion rates and a higher return on investment (ROI). Simple changes like switching hosting providers can have a dramatic increase in your overall CR.
- 47% of customers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less
- Pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds had a 1.9% conversion rate
- Pages that loaded in 5.7+ seconds had a conversion rate of 0.6%
- Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%
- 1 out of 5 online shoppers will abandon their cart because the transaction process was too slow.
- 79% of customers who report dissatisfaction with website performance are less likely to buy from that same site again
- 66% of customers said website performance influences their impression of the company
- 33 percent of customers have a negative impression of a company with a poor performing website
- Amazon calculated that webpage load slowdown of just one second could price it $1.6 billion in revenue annually
- Google loses 20% of their traffic for every additional 100 milliseconds it takes for a page to load
SEO & Marketing
Conquering Google’s (and other company’s) search engines is no mean feat. Their SEO requirements are clamping down on your websites and it’s time to take action. Page speed has a huge impact on SEO.
- Page speed directly affects Google Adwords effectiveness and Quality Score
- On a website that loads quickly, users will spend 70% more time on them
- After YouTube introduced a ‘lighter’ version of their website, poor internet areas like Africa, South East Asia, and Siberia saw an increase in traffic
- Following enabling GZip compression, Netflix reduced their bandwidth bill by 43%
- Yahoo cut their response time down by 400% and saw an increase of traffic by 9%
- Etsy added 160kb of images on their mobile site and saw a 12% increase in bounce rate
- Only 3% of marketers say faster loads are their top priority in 2019
- A significant number of marketers say that 2-3 seconds is an acceptable load time
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are a mystery to most marketers, though 76% have at least heard of them
- 57% of marketers have no current plans to implement AMP, while 23% are still considering it