How long will you sit and wait for a page to load before abandoning it? According to KISSmetrics, 40% of shopping visitors will abandon a website if they have to wait longer than three seconds for it to load. Apparently you all are in a hurry. That's like me in a mall. Anything for me here? Nope. Gone.
They also published numbers for how long mobile users said they would wait before abandoning a page:
- Less than 1 second: 3%
- 1-5 seconds: 16%
- 6-10 seconds: 30%
- 11-15 seconds: 16%
- 16-20 seconds: 15%
- More than 20 seconds: 20%
Let's look at this another way: Imagine a bunch of people load the same page at the same time and you are watching the viewers decrease on a chart as each deadline passes (e.g. "after 1 second" and "after 5 seconds"). You would see something like this:
- After 1 second... 3% of visitors abandon
- After 5... 19% are gone
- After 10... 49% have left
- After 16... now 65%
- And after 20 seconds... 80% are gone (I'm surprised it's this low)
Remember: within a few seconds, people start dropping off.
What can you do to make sure your site is fast enough? Start by running some performance tests. Below are four free performance testing tools you can use and two performance optimization articles, by conversion experts Peep Laja of ConversionXL and Neil Patel of QuickSprout, that are excellent resources for improving your site's load times.
4 Free Tools to Test Your Site's Performance
Pingdom
Provides a visually appealing interface for viewing your performance data. You can also sign up free to receive alerts for issues and outages.
View tool (and my score) >
Google Developers PageSpeed Insights
Provides "should fix" and "consider fixing" suggestions (as well as letting you which items "passed rules") for improving both your mobile and desktop sites.
View tool (and my score) >
WebPageTest
A very detailed look into the nitty gritty of your page's load times. Lots of data here, including a film strip view that shows you what your page looks like as it is loading.
View tool (and my score) >
YSlow
Add an extension to Chrome to very easily run this test on any web page you visit.
View tool >
2 Excellent Performance Optimization Articles
[ConversionXL] 11 Low-Hanging Fruits for Increasing Website Speed (and Conversions) >
"Website speed matters. Fast-loading sites perform better on all fronts: better user experience, higher conversions, more engagement, even higher search rankings. If you’re after mobile traffic (everyone is), site speed becomes even more important. No one wants to download a 4MB website on their smartphone, but most sites are that way. Your website can be different."
In this article, Peep Laja covers the following:
- How fast is fast enough?
- Impact on conversions
- Are you thinking about mobile users? You should.
- 11 Low-Hanging Fruits for Improving Site Speed
[QuickSprout] How to Make Your Site Insanely Fast >
No matter how beautiful your site is, your website page speed is critical to success. Not only do faster load times help boost search engine rankings, but 40% of people will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. To make matters worse, every extra second your site takes to load will cause a 7% decrease in your conversion rate.
So, how do you minimize your load times to maximize your revenue?
Well, I’ve used the techniques below to optimize Quick Sprout, and I’ve improved my load time by five seconds. Results, of course, vary, but if you follow the techniques below, you can expect anywhere from four to six seconds in time savings.
In this article, Neil Patel covers the following:
- The basics
- Combine images with CSS sprites
- Enable compression
- Spread your static content CDNs
- Leverage browser caching by using "expires" headers
- Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers
- Three performance testing tools
There are a lot of factors that contribute to performance. I highly recommend you take a look at these articles. Even if you don't study them in detail, you will at least get a grasp for how much goes into making your site load fast. Very good stuff.
Every time I run inquisitek.com through these tools it proves to be very educational. Taking a couple minutes to see if your site is fast enough and, if not, what needs to be fixed can make a huge difference in the success ($) of your site. It looks like I have some work to do. How about you?
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