How Website Performance Is Slowing Down Your Business
3 ways slow performances are impacting your conversions and your CX and what you can do to optimize it.
Nobody likes a slow website
We’ve all experienced frustration in front of snail-paced loading pages. We’ve cursed, we yelled, we’ve given up when sites were not responding fast enough. Your customers experience the same feelings when your website performance is not up to speed. Users have come to expect a certain responsiveness from their online content and businesses can suffer if their pages are slowed down by just a few milliseconds.
In this sense, speed has a direct impact on your business. It determines the quality of the customer experience you provide, how likely you are to retain customers, and influences your conversion rates. It is no longer acceptable to lose customers over controllable metrics. If you care about your business, you care about your performances.
1. Customer Satisfaction
Humans beings are impatient. Have you ever gotten frustrated because your train was delayed by just a few minutes? Have you ever complained that your food didn’t arrive within the first 20 minutes of the predicted time frame? If you answered yes to any of these, it is because our customer satisfaction is directly linked to the expectations that we have about the customer experience.
According to Google, 53% of mobile website visits bounce when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In contrast, most websites have an average loading time of 8–11 seconds. That is because people expect their experience on the internet to be responsive; more than 3 seconds and you lose customers.
When half of your visitors leave from your page due because of slow performances, the impact on business cannot be overstated. How do your pages stack up against these benchmarks?
2. Customer Retention
When the online experience is unsatisfying, it becomes harder to retain customers. For an online business to be successful, users need to interact meaningfully with the website; you want them to buy the products or you want them to subscribe. But you also want customers to become loyal and return to your brand for more.
Slow loading times don’t make people want to visit your brand again. If you go to buy some clothes on a website and the images take forever to load, you are likely to be annoyed and look elsewhere. 79% of people who experience slow performance on a website say they are less likely to buy from that same site again. Of these, about 50% will tell others about the negative experience with your website.
“79% of people who experience slow performance on a website say they are less likely to buy from that same site again.”
Your brand’s reputation suffers, you lose potential customers and you risk sending all those unhappy customers into the laps of your competition.
3. Conversions
So, how does this translate into your conversions?
Let’s take a look at Amazon: membership-based prime products are delivered in under 24 hours. The products that do not benefit from this advantage become like the second page of google: redundant.
It is the same for your web performance; if your site is too slow, your traffic will move on to a faster competitor and you will lose on conversions. For Amazon, a 100ms increase in load times decreased their revenue by 1%. That represents 1.6 billion dollars in loss.
“If your site is too slow, your traffic will move on to a faster competitor and you will lose on conversions.”
On the other hand, if you optimize your performances, you optimize your conversions. Simply put, the speed of your website directly impacts the success of your business.
What do you need to optimize your website performance?
The first step is to get a clear idea of the performance of your website. A tool to monitor and gain control over your mission-critical pages is indispensable for this purpose. Once you understand what slows you down, you can take measures to increase your performance.
Instead of waiting for your clients to report issues, and playing a guessing game to reproduce their conditions, tools that monitor performance help you save time by identifying the issues for you.
The second step is to monitor what affects the speed of your website and optimize accordingly. Here’s all the information you need to become a superhero at monitoring and improving your web performances:
Performance overview:
A dashboard is a must: it is the best way to see at-a-glance whether there are issues and where these issues are.
The average loading times of your pages, images and requests and their evolution through time are important indicators about what affects your overall performance. If you install a new plug-in for example, you can assess from these metrics how it impacts your speed. These should all be identifiable quickly and clearly on a dashboard.
Furthermore, since slow images are detrimental for e-commerces it is important for your slowest images to be ranked so you know what is affecting your business.
In more detail, seeing a graph of the performance of your pages, in comparison to the images and requests lets you know whether certain elements are significantly slowing down your overall website speed. If the blue ‘Images’ line is higher than the green ‘Pages’ one this means that an image is taking significantly longer than the page to load. You can then perform a drill-down to compare the speed of any two elements together.
Performance by session:
If you want more detail about the experience of your real customers, you can analyse the speed metric of each individual session by using session replay. This is crucial because people have a lot of different browsers and network conditions. You need to ensure that your site performs optimally for every one of your users.
How long does it takes for your content to load, for the images to show and for the user to interact with the page?
First meaningful paint: the point at which a user can start interacting significantly with the page.
DOMContent Loaded: the initial HTML document has been loaded yet some styling and images may not yet be.
Page Loaded: the entire page and all its resources have finished loading
Once you understand your basic speed metrics, you can perform a Network analysis to see how long it took for the different browser requests to load. How does your website perform under different conditions? Is there anything slowing it down, such as un-optimized images, third-party scripts, the CSS etc.?
Once you’ve exposed an element that is slowing down your page, you can target it to improve your web performance, and get it under that 3 second milestone over which people do not convert.
There you go!
To optimize your website performance and ultimately improve your business, you need to make sure your speed metrics are monitored for each user, across different conditions. That way, you can expose any elements that may slow you down and modify them accordingly.
