Most websites, especially mobile sites, take too long to load. But who cares? Well, it seems your customers do.
According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, 51% of customers expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn't loaded within 3 seconds. Eight online buyers out of ten who have trouble with web site performance say they won't return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.
To summarize, fast websites lead to better interactions with the brand and don't lose visitors who refuse to wait for sites to load, which leads to more conversions.
A website that takes too long to load hurts your sales. During the first second of delay your conversion drops by more than 7%, with the percentage growing exponentially for every additional second you make someone wait. Just to mention that for a lot of businesses this 7% conversion lose can make or break their business.
In addition, people are not patient and 40% of them will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Let's illustrate this with a simple example. Your website drives 1000 unique visitors a month. But it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That means you loose 400 visitors right away, they leave without even seeing the home page! And for the 600 visitors who remain, your conversion rate is freaking low. That means almost no call, no email, no purchase... Why bothering with a website then? Some would conclude that a slow site is useless and even harmful to your brand.
That's why some companies will try to sell you a new and faster website for 5 000 $ or more. We'll achieve the same result for 10 times less, in just 2 days, not 6 months!
Google has been taking page load time into account for its search algorithm for the past years. Google figures people don’t like sites that are slow so why rank them highly in the search results? That means you get some SEO benefit by having a fast site.
In other words, fast load times equal higher rankings. And higher rankings lead to more traffic. More traffic leads to more social medias shares. And guess what? Social medias are the new SEO.
As we mentionned previously, a faster web site means a better visitor experience. This will lead to more shares, tweets, pins, likes... and to more traffic, more purchases, more revenues and the wheel goes on and on!
Want more reasons to make your website loads faster? Just refer to this infographic from Kissmetrics.
Load Faster works with every web technology, including (but not limited to) popular frameworks like these