A marketer’s ability to have their company’s website’s pages load quickly has direct impact on sales and ultimately on the bottom line. Page load times can impact the overall customer experience, as well as SEO as page speed determines your ranking when users search in a browser. According to the Aberdeen Group, a 1-second delay in page-load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. And that sounds bad for business.
We partnered with the UK’s leading glasses e-tailor Glasses Direct to study page speed and conversion behavior. Our study enabled us to build a case for the true correlation between page speed and dollar values. Our findings substantiated the Aberdeen findings, where increases in page-load time significantly impacted conversion rates, dropping by 7%.In order to get these findings, we monitored both page performance and revenue on the Glasses Direct Site. From the monitoring, we measured the impact of average paid-load time a user experienced to their likelihood to convert on the site.
We found there were significant correlations between page-load time and the likelihood of a user to convert. Here’s what we learned:
- When page-load time increases, likely conversion rates dropped by 6.7%. In the above graph you can see conversion peaking at around 2 seconds. This confirms the findings summarized in the KISSMetrics Infographic showing 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. After this peak the rate drops by 6.7% for each additional second.
- Page-load time for non-converters, users who abandoned the page without converting, was 3-to-4 times higher than for converters. This indicates that visitors who aren’t taking any actions on your site may have abandoned because of the page delays.
We calculated lost revenue for each additional second a site takes to load. Let’s say a website’s average ticket size is $75 and conversion rate is 5%. So if it takes their pages an additional second to load then for every 400,000 unique visits each month, there would be a loss of $1.3m in revenue per year.
Or to put it in other words, you could gain this revenue by speeding up your site just by 1 second. These findings are very important to TagMan as we have developed our latest version of our Tag Management Platform which optimizes page load time for all tags Smart Tag Loading.
Glasses Direct, our partner in this study, speaks on the findings. “Site speed is the most important aspect of our business,” says Oliver Elliott, Head of Digital Marketing at Glasses Direct. “Seeing this direct impact on our site visitors’ experience and how it impacts their ability to convert to customers makes us even more obsessed about our site’s speed and the overall experience we’re delivering.”
To find out how much impact an additional second load time can have on your revenue, try the calculations for yourself using our Conversion Loss Calculator. You can use a slider to apply the Glasses Direct findings to your website stats and find out how much revenue you could gain.
