Infographic: Web Performance Impacts Conversion Rates
When considering a business website and how it will look, what features you will include, and your plans for its success, conversion rates are one of the most important factors to take into account in its design and function. What is a conversion rate? The conversion rate is the percentage of users who land and browse around the site who go onto use one of its functions eg. click onto a link, fill out a form, submit their email address, or make a purchase. Any delays in the time it takes for a page to load will have a quite substantial effect on the conversion rates and here we can see how with some facts and figures:
Even a one second delay in the loading of a website page means a reduction in conversions. Research has found that this is a 7% reduction, in fact, plus a resulting 11% less page views and a 16% reduction in customer satisfaction. 1 in 4 website users will leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load, and 74% of website visitors on a mobile site will abscond if they have to wait more than 5 seconds for it to load. The optimum time for a page to load, in order to bring about a conversion, is 2 seconds. If a user waits 500 ms then there’s a 26% increase in frustration and an 8% decrease in engagement, so it’s important to not leave an impatient visitor waiting!
In actual fact, a website has only a 5 second opportunity to make an impression, statistics show, or a user will leave and go elsewhere. If a website is generally performing badly, in all its aspects and functions, and is not fast and efficient, 46% of all first-time visitors will abandon it and never return.
Let’s now take Amazon as an example. If there’s only a 1 second improvement to speed on the website ie. pages loading, then a 2% increase in conversions would result. Here’s some other interesting facts. When Mozilla made their pages load 2.2 seconds faster, it achieved 60 million more Firefox downloads a year. And a fundraising site for a presidential campaign enhanced their page turnover speed by a massive 60%, bringing about a staggering 14% increase in conversions when it came to people taking the decision to click through and to make a donation.
We can therefore see that increase in the page loading speed on a website of any type has a dramatic effect when it comes to conversions by website users, with plenty of statistical evidence to support this. Website users want to minimize their time spent interacting with a website, even if it’s one that really interests them, and therefore your website must be as fast and efficient as possible. The performance of your website is crucial to how users interact and engage with it, and how long they stay around. If your website pages are speedy, your visitors will linger for far longer.
