A one second delay in a page’s load time means 11% less page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com and reported by Kissmetrics,
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- If an ecommerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
The average loading time for 26,000 sites that Hubspot analyzed was 3.9 seconds. In a space as highly competitive as the internet, the 1.9 seconds could be the difference between closing a sale and having someone use a competitor. Even online retail giant Amazon found a 1% increase in their revenue for every 100 milliseconds (1/10th of a second) of improvement to their site speed.
Google found that increasing their search results to 30/page (vs 10) resulted in a 0.5 second increase in page load - which in turn created a 20% decrease in page views to that test group.
So what can you do to speed up your website?
- Compress web pages and assets
- Optimize code to reduce server load and response times
- Minify external files (CSS, JS, etc.)
- Minimize the number of HTTP requests
- Enable browser caching (smartly)
- Optimize images
- Reduce redirects
- Remove or reduce plugins
- Use asynchronous loading techniques
There’s a lot written about optimizing websites: Here’s a lot more detail on the list above; Official Google documentation is here, and this is a good infographic from Kissmetrics!
Is your site slow? Find out using Google's PageSpeed Insights. It's a free and on-demand analysis that will give you specific recommendations to fix issues.
Hope that helps!
- Todd