Delight Mobile and Desktop Visitors with a Speedy Site to Increase Engagement

Website performance has a huge impact, but it often takes a back seat to visual design. A beautiful looking website is almost useless if impatient visitors jump ship before it loads.

Less really is more

• The BBC has seen that they lose an additional 10% of users for every additional second it takes for their site to load. Source "How the BBC builds websites that scale"

• Tests of the new, faster FT.com showed users were up to 30% more engaged—meaning more visits and more content being consumed. Source "Financial Times Hopes Speedy New Website Will Boost Subscribers".

• In 2014 Walmart.com shaved more than four seconds from its load time, for every second of improvement, Walmart.com experienced up to a 2% conversion rate increase. Source "Speed is key: Optimize your mobile experience"

How fast should my website be?

A mobile website should load in under 3 seconds, according to Google’s DoubleClick, any longer and you can expect up to 53% of visitors to give-up and (most likely) visit your competitor’s website instead. It’s not always possible but aim for a load time of 1.5 seconds, I think 3 seconds should be the upper limit.

The faster, the better

When the competition realises performance matters, 3 seconds will be considered sluggish. Google aims for a load speed of 500 milliseconds (Watch on YouTube), to give that some context the human eye blinks in 300 to 400 milliseconds.

It’s not just users who like fast websites; Google uses page speed as one of its many ranking signals. It’s worth mentioning site speed isn’t a silver bullet to the top of search engines, Google still ranks website content and relevance above performance.

The benefits are clear

Connection speed is unknown, and the range of devices used to access a website are fragmented. Optimising for speed is one of the best ways to improve the user experience and to maximise the number of people who will access your website.

Delight mobile and desktop visitors with a speedy site to increase engagement, decrease visitor abandonment and to give your website a competitive edge.