Importance of Page Speed

See below our infographic, or see text version including references or look at our case studies.

An official study by Google Inc. and Forrester Consulting states that the initial loading time of a website has a major impact on how many visitors instantly abandon the page (bounce rate). While Forrester Consulting showed that 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load¹, Google further qualified this by stating that an additional 0.5s in loading time actually resulted in 20% less traffic.²

A survey conducted by JupiterResearch further stresses the importance of quick loading times as more than 75% of people stated they would never return back to a website that took longer than 4 seconds to load (irrecoverably lost traffic). Similarly, 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with a site’s performance will go somewhere else to shop next time.¹

According to StatCounter, more than 20% of all website traffic is coming from mobile devices in 2014, equivalent to a year-on-year increase of 53%¹². When browsing the Web, mobile devices often have limited bandwidth and download speeds, which makes the importance of quick loading times all the more important.

Speed Rule No.1 The quicker your page, the fewer will actually abandon it / more will actually remain on it.

Extensive studies by Amazon, Google, Yahoo and AOL have shown that consumers are easily frustrated by the performance of websites and that an increased page speed yields in significantly more activity per user (in terms of page views/sales). Consequently, lots of potential page views/sales are going down the drain on slower pages just because of a few seconds difference.

In 2009, Akamai Research showed that a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.¹ Amazon went one step further and impressively demonstrated that just 0.1-second (100ms) of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales⁵, that’s equivalent to a staggering 10% decrease in sales for every second of extra load time. If you sell $500 per day, that’s an additional $18k per year.

Similarly, Marissa Mayer, former Google VP of Search and User experience, impressively showed that a 30% reduction of the page size of Google Maps also resulted in 30% more requests!²

As further supportive evidence, a study from 2009 showed that up to 37% of users get distracted while waiting for a page to load.¹ This is the primary reason for lower conversion rates, and it greatly increased the risk of a belated user drop-out. More hard facts:

• In 2009, AOL showed that faster page speed can lead to 50% more page views.⁶
• In 2008, Yahoo showed that increasing speed by 0.4s increased traffic by 9%.⁷
• A study from 2009 showed that for 52% of online shoppers, their loyalty to a site is heavily contingent upon quick page loading (especially for high-spending shoppers).¹
• In 2009, 57 percent of online shoppers insist on a rapid checkout process, up nearly 10 percent from three years ago.¹

Speed Rule No.2 Page speed greatly improves user experience, yielding more page views / sales