With the advent and dominance of mobile search, the load time for your site and your pages has become more critical than ever before. Slow load times are killing your chances at raising your conversions. Recent SEO marketing research done by quite a few major companies has revealed that when their sites got faster, their bottom lines got bigger.Nearly 85% of people surveyed in a recent study expected a site to load within three seconds. The challenge? The top 500 ecommerce sires were measured and the median load time for their sites and pages is ten seconds.
- The research suggests that for a loading time that is one second faster than what you are currently testing at, your sales will increase 7%.
- On the other side, if your page slows down by one second, your customer satisfaction drops nearly 20%, your sales plummet nearly 10%, and you attract 10% fewer potential customers to your site.
- Nearly 50% of people surveyed in recent SEO marketing research will not only give you a less than stellar word of mouth but will actually have a poor perception about your business due to your low loading times.
- In addition, if your site is loading for longer than three seconds, 40% will bounce to another site and nearly 80% of those who click away will never return to your site.
- Many reasons contribute to slow load times including forms that are too long, slow servers, tracking codes and analytics that are far too complicated, graphics and video heavy pages, and low quality code used.
- Many Fortune 1000 companies have begun measuring losses and increases in sales by the millisecond. Every time Yahoo increased its loading speed by 400 milliseconds, it gained nearly 10% more in traffic. WalMart’s revenue increased 2% for every second their online site got faster.
Your load time is critical to your long term success and just a fraction of a second added in speed can give the edge you need over your rivals.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
