In 2015, Pinterest developers conducted an experiment on their website, where they increased the page speed by 60%. The result was a 40% increase in conversion rates. Since the engineers at Pinterest only did some optimization changes in the backend, so the only metric that changed was page speed. Therefore it was very clear that the increase in page speed was responsible for the improved conversion rates.
Amazon, the eCommerce store we all use to buy our favorite things, lost 0.5 billion dollars due to a reduction of 1s in the page speed. If a 1s delay can do that to Amazon guess what it will do to a medium to small business. 2500 people were surveyed for a study, during which 65% people admitted that they left a website because it was slow. Research has also found that even a 0.2s decrease in page speed can reduce conversion rates by 30%.
These are hard facts we have collected from reputed sources like Google and Moz. People are getting more and more busy and have less and less time. People won’t waste their time on a website which takes more than 2.5 seconds to load. Yes, that is the time people have for a website. Fast loading websites have been known to increase user trust and confidence in a platform.
In many developing nations like India where people are conscious about the amount data being consumed by a website or someone using a hack to copy their data are some of the factors why people have trust issues with websites which take more time to load. Page speed is also very critical in places like payment gateways, where a slight delay can make the user question its authenticity. And this doesn’t end there since people are pretty social nowadays, bad reviews are bound to be floated around in timelines and stories. 41% people out of 2500 admitted sharing negative reviews of a slow site with their friends especially if it was an online store. After all, this comes the topic of SEO. Does page speed really affect the ranking of a webpage?
The simple answer, Yes it does. Google has algorithms which place faster webpages higher on the ranking chart than the slower ones. In 2016 Google even announced that page speed will be a major metric in determining the page rank of your website’s homepage, which has only been taken more and more seriously by Google overtime since according to them a page is slow if it takes more than 2.5s to load. So, to sum it all up, slow pages:
1. Lose you a lot of money
2. Frustrates valuable customers
3. Reduces trust and tarnishes your online reputation In the second part of this article, we will discuss the factors that affect page speed of a website and how to counter those factors.