When it comes to web page performance, many developers and designers know how important it is, but may have a hard time convincing either their clients or management to invest the resources into making it a reality. So, if you’re in that situation, how do you convince the powers that be to make performance a priority?
Improving a site’s performance can take time and resources, so for many decision-makers there will need to be a clear business case for making the investment. For instance, how will the speed of the page impact revenues, or customer engagement or conversions? To make this case, you will often need numbers and case studies, and so here are few that may be of help.
Case Studies
- In optimizing their site, Walmart found that for every 1s of improvement increased conversions by 2%, and for every 100ms of improvement, they grew incremental revenue by up to 1%.
- When Intuit did a major overhaul of their consumer sites, they learned that reducing the page load time brought significant increases in conversion rates , anywhere from 3% to 1% per 1s improvement (the rate of improvement depended on the starting point. For instance taking a page from 8s to 7s had a greater impact than improving a page from 3s to 2s).
- During their campaign, the Obama team found that optimizing their page (60% faster) resulted in 14% increase in donations.
- Amazon discovered that even delays of 1/10th of a second had a noticeably negative impact on revenues.
- Bing saw a drops in revenue/user for each delay they introduced into their search results. This ranged from 1.2% drop for a 500ms delay all the way to a 4.3% drop for a 2s delay.
- Mozilla did A/B testing on their Firefox download page, and saw a significantly greater rate of downloads when they shaved 2s off their page load time.
General Statistics
- A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. If you do the math, an e-commerce site making $100,000 per day would potentially lose over $2.5 million in lost sales every year for ever 1s page delay ($100,000 x 7% x 365).
- Mobile pages that were just one second faster experienced a 27% increase in conversions.
- When shopping, 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3s.
- 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with the performance of a site are less likely to buy from the same site again.
Relation to Search Engine Visibility
Google has been using page speed in its ranking for a while, but now is also considering mobile-friendliness as a major factor. Since performance is one aspect of ‘mobile-friendliness,’ this means that performance is only continuing to grow in importance for search result rankings. For most businesses, search visibility is a huge deal, which, by implication, means that avoiding poor page performance is also a huge deal.
Infographics
For a visual look at some of these statistics, and many more, here are some helpful infographics:
- How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line [via kissmetrics.com]
- Web Performance Is User Experience [via soasta.com]
Making the Case
Although selling performance is not always easy, hopefully some of these statistics can help make the case for the business value of optimizing our sites. Even though some of these studies are a few years old now, it’s important to remember that consumers haven’t gotten less demanding in recent years. If anything, they’re more demanding. And therefore it’s in the best interest of any business to make sure performance is a priority when it comes to its online presence.