Is a slow website killing your sales?
We’ve all experienced it: You search for a product or service, click a result on Google, and the page starts loading… and loading… and loading until you click back and move on to the following search result.
However, slow websites are more than an inconvenience. They can damage your sales and conversion and other metrics like bounce rate and organic search rankings. In this blog, I’ll look at a few studies that should incentivize you to take a second look at your page load times and do something about it.
6% sales increase per second
When discussing website speed and its impact on conversion, people often refer to an old study from 2010 that concluded that a one-second increase in page load time reduces conversion by 7%.
A new study from 2022 looked at 16 billion page loads on 250 retailer websites and reached similar conclusions: On desktop, a one-second page load decrease correlated with a 5.6% increase in conversion and an 11.7% drop in bounce rate. On mobile, the impact on conversion was even more significant at 5.9%.
A one-second page load decrease correlated with a 5.6% increase in conversion.
The study further concluded that optimizing site speed could reduce a shopping journey length by as much as 23 seconds.
As page load time increases, the conversion rate falls, and bounce rate increases (Ecommerce Speedhub, 2022)
Google penalizes slow websites
In 2021 Google rolled out a page experience update. While page speed has been a ranking factor for a long time, the update had Google further consider page experience, including page load time, as a ranking factor. In addition, the worse-than-peers performance of a website would cause your site to have a higher bounce rate and more people to return to search after clicking on your results, further worsening your organic ranking.
After the page experience update, there was some debate within the marketing community on the impact of these on search rankings, but Google’s search advocate John Mueller further confirmed this on his Twitter during the rollout of the 2021 update.
Speaking of Google and page speeds
In 2017 Google released a study looking at website speeds and their impact on user statistics. Unfortunately, this study was done before the 5G era. According to their data:
Every additional second a page loads, conversion can fall as much as 20%
The bounce rate probability of web pages went up 32% if the speed increased from 1s to 3s
If page speed dropped from 1s to 6s, bounce probability more than doubled
Are you losing because of a slow website?
Improving page load times can be a daunting task. Especially for well-optimized sites, shaving additional seconds can be a lot of work. However, often enough, there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that can significantly reduce the page size. I have seen even large retailers that have not optimized their website images or have unnecessary code load for customers.