How Website Speed is Affecting Your Conversion Rate

In case you have ever questioned the importance of website speed, vis-a-vis conversion rates, consider the following statistics, provided courtesy of statista:

• Americans spend nearly an hour-and-a-half on their smartphones every day.
• Americans spend just over an hour a day surfing the Internet on a personal computer.
• Last year, 196 million Americans made an online purchase.
• By 2018, more than 215 million Americans will be online shoppers.

Okay, so maybe those statistics don’t send shock waves down your spine. But when they’re combined with the following, they just might:

• The current population of the United States is 325 million.
• The average attention span of a person living in the United States is eight seconds.
• Nearly half of all website users say they expect pages they visit to load in two seconds or less–otherwise they’re gone.

Think about it. Your website has two seconds to grab the attention of nearly 100 million online shoppers. Two seconds. That’s roughly the amount of time it takes for an Internet user to type in a competitor’s website address.

And that’s not all. In today’s hyper-connected, social-media-crazy world, disappointing one potential customer with inadequate website speed can quickly turn into two, three, or hundreds more missed opportunities to convert visitors to sales.

Look at this:

• Nearly 80 percent of web shoppers who believe they’ve experienced a problem with a website won’t return to that site. Ever.
• Of those who won’t return, 44 percent say they will tell their friends about the problem.

It almost goes without saying (almost), but website speed matters–a lot.

That’s why, if you care about conversions rates, you need to care about your website speed. Shorten your website’s load time, and you’re almost guaranteed to improve your conversion rate.

Here’s the proof:

• Walmart.com discovered that every one second of load-time improvement results in a conversion-rate increase of 2 percent.
• When Firefox reduced its average load time by 2.2 seconds, it saw a 15 percent increase in downloads.
• AutoAnything.com cut its website load time in half, and saw a 9 percent increase in its conversion rate.

People just don’t want to wait anymore. They want information, answers and access to your products, and they want it in two seconds or less. Back in the day, people might have been willing to wait four or five seconds for your site to load. But that was back in 2000, when the average attention span of a human was 12 seconds.

Yes, people are impatient, but that’s not the only reason your website speed affects your conversion rate.

Google, the most-used search engine on the planet with more than 1 billion unique visitors each month, rewards websites with crisp, clean looks and fast loading times by listing them atop of search results. And if people find your website before your competition, they are more likely to be converted from visitors to sales.

And that, friends, is what it’s all about: conversions.

Discover where your website is underperforming and therefore, where you are missing conversions, with the Inbound Marketing Assessment. It’s quick and easy, but will reveal the gaps inhibiting conversion rate optimization on your website. Get started on your way to website Conversion Rate Optimization by clicking the button below.