Is your website speed impacting your revenue?
David Hayes
Head of Front-end Development
If your website loads slower than it takes to read this sentence you could be losing revenue.
It’s a hard truth and one which few businesses truly appreciate the impact of or know how to deal with it.
What is web performance?
The term ‘web performance’ is the time it takes for a web page to load in a user’s browser. There are a number of factors which can impact web performance, including:
The server the website is hosted on
How a website is built (technology and language)
The internet connection your user is reliant on
As our internet connections improve with technology such as fibre and 5G, more and more scrutiny and expectations are being placed on those who run websites to ensure they perform at their optimum.
Performance is measured with a range of metrics, which include:
Total load time: How long does it take for the full page to load
Time to interactive: Time it takes before a user can interact with the page
First contentful paint: Time it takes before the first text or image becomes visible
Cumulative layout shift: Measures the movement of visible elements whilst the page loads
Why is it important?
We’ve all been there, waiting for a web page to load, not sure if it’s your connection or the website. It’s frustrating and ultimately a bad experience.
Over half of web traffic comes from mobile and whilst we have 5G connections, most roaming users will be using 4G and 3G connections (even 5G has issues when not in direct sight of a mast). Not all users have access to direct fibre connections either and still rely on sub 30mb speeds.
A Google study1 found 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load, yet the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page was 22 seconds!
When we look at performance every millisecond counts. Another Google study2 found a 0.1 second improvement increased conversion rates by 8.4% on retail websites.
But it’s not just users and their behaviours which are impacted by the speed of your site. Natural search (Google, Bing etc) result rankings are also impacted.
Google confirmed back in 20183, page speed is a ranking factor in mobile search. The slower your site is, the less visitors will find it via search as your site won’t be top of the results.
(Less traffic + Fewer conversions) = Smaller revenue.
What can I do?
Small changes can have big impacts.
One issue we see time and time again are large image sizes. It’s not uncommon for us to see image sizes in the 1-5mb range, which on a mobile connection can add 5-7 seconds (in a market where every millisecond matters).
Unused code is also a big factor and it’s common to see website code across pages which don’t need it. Not only does this add additional data required to be loaded over the connection but additional time for the browser to compute it.
In some cases, larger architectural changes may need to be made. Is your site designed with performance in mind? Has a server-side language been used to render what is a static website?
How Navos can help
Need help with your website?
Our expert team at Navos have experience optimising websites to perform, increasing conversion rates and ultimately revenue.
We can undertake full performance reviews and work with you to implement changes, supercharging your user experience and outcomes.
Get in touch with our team to get started
3 https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search
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