The real cost of speed

The speed of page loading and rendering determines the rate of conversions and other metrics. It has a direct as well as indirectly impact. The indirect one is that speed actualy allows other investments to be effective. Its for instance estimated, that can easily save up to 20% on digital marketing funds. The acceleration of your website thus has a positive effect both on the profit of the project, and also reduces wasted investmens.

With a slow-loading page, it doesn't matter how much money you put in ads, how good design and features of your site are, or how well curated content you have. All this is simply not important when the visitor is leaving.

However, the most significant and best studied is the effect of speed on conversions. Countless studies show how merely a fractions of seconds drastically reduce conversions, cause visitor loss, and negatively affect behavior of visitors, who stays - eg. pages viewed or time spent on page. It is in your best interest to design and optimize the website accordingly to achieve the shortest possible loading and rendering time.

Last but not least, the speed of your site negatively affects search engine optimization and therefore search position, leading to lower traffic.

Search engine rankings

Search engines penalize slow pages and the page will appear in lower positions or disapear in other pages of the search results, which few people visit.

Given that search engines are usually the dominant source of visitors, this in itself is a very good argument to deal with speed. Faster speed represents a tool to increase traffic.

Loss of conversions

Based on research conducted by Google we know the approximate ratio of rendering speed to conversions, see the chart below.

The most significant effect speed has on mobile device users. As the most visitors comes from mobile devices, it's important to consider focusing on this group of visitors. On mobile, conversions drops by up to 95% for pages that take a few seconds to render.

Real-world examples

Large platforms and e-commerce players are well aware of the importance of speed, and as a result, there are many well-documented measurements of the link between loading speed and business results. Below are some of them:

Dakine, a retail clothing company, has published the effect of accelerating their German e-shop. After the revision of the website, they achieved an acceleration of 48-65% depending on the particular page (homepage, product page, category, etc.), which after the evaluation next year reportedly brought an increase in revenues from mobile conversions by 45%.

By reducing load time by 38%, Pfizer increased conversions by 9% and reduced first-page bounce rate by 20%.

BMW's redesign of their website, with loading speed prioritization, increased product page visits from 8% to 30%.

In 2019, eBay stated that an acceleration of 0.1s corresponds to an increase in the total number of products added to the cart by all users by 0.5%.

Technical side of things

Page speed is affected by a host of factors, and aside from the basic ones, such as the infrastructure on which the website runs, is literally an alchemy of the right technical solution and the tweaking of countless small aspects. In principle, it can be divided into three aspects - server response, content loading and content rendering. Each aspect is affected by different factors.

On average, it takes 87.84% longer to load a web page on a phone than on a desktop. Most Internet content today is consumed through mobile devices, and many developers dont take into account many variable such as variable connection speed, and that most of the population has less powerful phones where it is not just about loading speed but also rendering of the page.

The greatest potential is lost on mobile devices, which, as it has already been mentioned, are often forgotten in terms of speed during development. Interesting fact is that although most visits come from mobile devices today, desktops and laptops have a higher conversion rate for slow sites. Such site loses a substantial part of its customers. Mobile users are significantly less willing to wait for a slow website - if the loading time goes from 1 second to 3, the probability of a visitor leaving will increase by 32%.

We are aware of the great importance of page loading speed and therefore we not only focus on it so that we deliver a solution that loads at lightning speed, but also after handing over the project to the owner we usually monitor the loading speed and notify you if the loading speed significantly change to the worse.

One good news is - the most of the research that has been conducted has focused on visitors from the United States and other data shows that for example here in Europe visitors are a few hundred milliseconds more patient. However, comparable behavior occurs, albeit a little bit later.