Traffic, conversion rate and bounce rate statistics
Statistics show the abandonment rate is huge for websites that take over 2 seconds to load on mobile and over 3 seconds to load on a desktop. Every tenth of a second leads to traffic and conversion losses. Also, Google will penalize the website if it doesn't respect these limits and it will end up showing lower in results, causing even more loss of traffic.
Case studies:
✔ Shopzilla shaved off their load times from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds and experienced 12% revenue hike.
✔ Walmart improved conversions by 2% for every second cut
✔ Amazon reported 1% loss in revenue per 100ms site load delay.
✔ Mozilla improved conversions by 15.4% shaving off 2.2 seconds of load time.
✔ US President Obama's fundraising campaign increased donation conversions by 14% when they decreased the page speed from 5 seconds to 2 seconds.
✔ Yahoo increased traffic by 9% for every 400 milliseconds of improvement.
More case studies:
✔ 1) In 2016, Ancestory.com recorded a 7% positive rise in conversions after improving the render time of web pages by 68%, reducing page bloat by 46% and reducing load time by 64%.
✔ 2) In 2016, a presentation by AliExpress claimed they reduced load time for their pages by 36% and recorded a 10.5% increase in orders and a 27% increase in conversion rates for new customers.
✔ 3) In 2016, The Trainline reduced latency by 0.3s across their funnel and revenue increased by an extra £8 million a year.
✔ 4) In 2016, Instagram increased impressions and user profile scroll interactions by simply speeding up their site.
✔ 5) In 2016, Financial Times declared tests of the new, faster FT.com resulted in users were up to 30% more engaged with the site.
✔ 6) In 2017, Zitmaxx Wonen reduced load time to 3 seconds and conversions jumped 50.2%. Revenue from mobile increased by 98.7%.
✔ 7) In 2017, COOK increased conversion rate by 7% after reducing average page load time by 0.85 seconds. Bounce rate also fell by 7%.
✔ 8) In 2017, Pinterest performance optimisation resulted in a 40% decrease in wait time, a 15% increase in organic traffic and a 15% increase in signups conversion rate.
✔ 9) In 2017, BBC declared they lose an additional 10% of users for every additional second it takes for their site to load.
Source: click on every link individually
Google study from 2017:
An increase of website loading speed on mobile devices leads to a higher bounce-rate by:
- From 1 to 3 seconds, bounce-rate increases by 35%
- From 1 to 5 seconds, bounce-rate increases by 90%
- From 1 to 6 seconds, bounce-rate increases by 106%
- From 1 to 10 seconds, bounce-rate increases by 123%
Source: Google
Important: Bounce rate is different from the "non-entrance" rate. Bounce rate represents the number of people who come to a website but only visit a single page, usually the homepage, then leave. A visit to a webpage that leads to an immediate exit is referred to as a “non-entrance.” The web user does not linger on the page long enough to view more than a brief glimpse of it. Sometimes people click on the "back" button automatically, without even being conscious. They notice the bar isn't loading and instinctively click on the back button, without even using their brain and making a conscious decision to leave. This happens especially on mobile devices and, if we pay attention, we can notice ourselves doing the same thing from time to time.
What a good bounce-rate means depends on the field. In the case of newspapers, a high bounce rate is something normal, but in the case of online shops, this number should be small. For more information about normal bounce-rates depending on the field, you can click here or browse the web for more in detail information.
Page speed optimization will lower both bounce rate and "non-entrance" rates. On a slow website, even those that have the patience to access it, will still navigate on average fewer pages of the website because of the bad experience they are having. In the case of a newspaper or blog, they will read fewer articles and therefore watch fewer adds. In the case of an online shop, clients will not have the patience to navigate through the portfolio of products and have a chance of falling in love with them. Their shopping experience will be an unpleasant one. Their trust in the brand will also be affected because a slow site communicates an air of "small," "cheap" and "unprofessional" business. Would a big and serious company have a slow, unoptimized website?
Very interesting:
"For every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed, Mobify's customer base saw a 1.11% lift in session based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $376,789. Similarly, for every 100ms decrease in checkout page load speed, Mobify's customers saw a 1.55% life in session based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $526,147"
source: WPO Stats
Kissmetrix study:
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
- 51% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error.
- 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available.
- 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.
- A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 11% reduction in traffic, 7% reduction in conversions and 16% reduction in customer satisfaction.
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
Unique Google experiment:
Google did an interesting experiment with regard to load times. Google Vice President Marissa Mayer asked web surfers – would you rather see 10 or 30 results for your Google search? The users agreed that 30 results per page sounded like a good idea. So Google implemented it on some results pages.
...and then the shock came.
Pages that displayed 30 results each had traffic to them drop an astounding 20%. Google tested the loading difference between the 10 and 30 results pages and found that it was just half of a second. If half of a second made that much of a difference in how long users were willing to wait, how much of a difference could it make to your site if you carved a second or two off of load time?
Quotes:
We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to
fetch a single URL). This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site.
Jhon Mueller, Google
Slow websites are crawled more rarely by GoogleBot. Why? Because crawling costs energy, therefore MONEY. This is particularly problematic for slow news websites because it can nullify the advantage of posting exclusive news. The same story posted on a faster competitor website will appear first, despite being published later. Situations will arise where somebody posts a piece of exclusive news but, for a while, it will not show up in google because the website isn't getting crawled, while a competitor website who copied that news is ranking and banking with it.
This treatment may seem unfair and undemocratic, but we have to remember that Google is a private company. Why should a private company waste 4-5 times more money crawling a slow and technically redundant website? If a site is 4-5 times harder to crawl, then it will simply get crawled less. Therefore, the same amount of energy is spent crawling it, and from this point of view, everything is as fair and democratic as it gets.
It’s clear from our test that the speed of our website affects both of these revenue streams, over the short term, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, and in the long-term millions. The speed of the site negatively impacts a user’s session depth, no matter how small the delay. Slow sites also have a detrimental effect on the number of articles people read. Largely, the slower the site, the greater the effect. The data suggests, both in terms of user experience and financial impact, that there are clear and highly valued benefits in making the site even faster. From this research we’ve chosen to invest even more time in making every aspect of the new FT.com website even faster over the coming months.
Financial Times manager, after completely rebuilding the website in order to make it faster
2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under
a half second."
Mayle Ohye, Google
No need for us to convince you, mathematics is taking care of that part
When it comes to a website that's doing terrible in the page speed area, an advanced Wordpress speed optimization service will do wonders. If the website is producing 500$ a month and suffers a 20% increase in profit, a page speed optimization will pay itself back in basically three months. Not to mention the SEO and branding benefits that come on top of that.
In the case of a website already decently optimized but not optimized to perfection, even though no miracles will happen, the benefits will still be big. Mathematics tells us that 5% of 1000$ means 50$. In a year this means 600$ and the optimization costs only 299$. Even in such cases, mathematics still recommends going PREMIUM.
