There is a lot of controversy surrounding website speed. Many argue that speed is secondary to content and that improving it is not cost-effective. Even Google recommends focusing on content when building a website.
However, faster websites consistently perform better than slower ones. So, while content may be king, the infographic by hostingtribunal.com references several companies that prove you should pay attention to website speed.
Where it comes to internet presence, you don’t get bigger than Google. With 72.87% of market shares for desktop and 92.59% for mobile searches, Google might seem indispensable. However, research shows that not even Google is immune to the effects of long load times.
Namely, Google conducted an insightful experiment. They asked a group of users if they would prefer getting 30 search results per page, rather than the usual 10. Most users agreed for increase. However, implementing the change caused a 20% drop in traffic. Rendering 30 results simply took more time. And the length of the added delay will probably surprise you—it was a mere 0.5 seconds!
We can mention AliExpress as a company that made a significant improvement in their load times. They reduced the load times of their pages by 36%. This resulted in 10.5% more orders and 27% more conversions from new customers.
The impact website speed has on online stores should not surprise us. Amazon—the largest e-commerce company—estimated that 1 second of added delay would cost them $1.6 billion a year. That’s 1% fewer sales per 0.1 seconds of delay.
Some other success stories come from Yahoo! who reduced their load times by 0.4 seconds and recorded a 9% increase in traffic and SmartFurniture.com who gained 20% more organic search traffic due to faster load times. Walmart, one of the world’s biggest retailers, gained 2% in conversions per second of improvement.
As you see, some of the most popular websites out there benefited from improving their speed. And if reducing load times was beneficial for them, then so it can be for your website. If you’d like to see what you can expect if you speed up your website, check out the infographic below for more useful information.
