12 Mar

The importance of the loading speed of a website

Nobody likes to wait even for loading a website.

If your website is slow to display, the visitor will go elsewhere. Hence the importance of the loading speed of a website

The loading speed of web pages has always been a point that Google put forward. Its attention to this element has also increased with the approach of the Mobile First Index, which is already planned for 2018. But the importance of the speed of a website is not only about switching to mobile but also concerns many points that can strongly impact the results of a company through its website, hence an interest in optimizing this criterion in the performance of its website.

Display speed and user experience intimately linked

Any organization in charge of a website (company, institution, association, …) must be aware of the importance of the loading speed of its various Web pages. The speed of a site strongly impacts the user experience well before arriving on the site. It is also the first UX element of a user, giving him his first impression, well before seeing any visual site or experiencing a navigation that would not necessarily be very ergonomic.

The impact of speed influences many criteria, which can become a force for a website with good performance or, on the contrary, be a real obstacle to the achievement of its objectives.

Poor loading speed: noticeable impacts in performance

57% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to appear. And 80% say they never come back again “

An impact on the attendance of a website

The very first impact of too much loading speed concerns the audience of a website. According to some studies, 57% of Internet users would leave the website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to appear. And of these, 80% say they will never come back to the website after this first failed experience.

Other metric, but this time on the bounce rate; a website that would load in more than 58 seconds would have a bounce rate 2x higher than a site that would load in only 1 second.

A NEGATIVE IMPACT ON REVENUE FROM E-COMMERCE SITES

“Internet users accept less and less to wait. If the loading time is too long, they switch on and off, and risk going elsewhere, at the competition »

The consequences on the economic performance of a sales website due to poor performance in terms of speed seem beautiful and well connected. According to some studies, the conversion rate of a website can be reduced by up to 7% for a single second of overload.

Regarding the abandonment rate of the basket, 20% of users would abandon their basket because of the loading time. Online shoppers are 67% to state that website slowness is the main reason for abandoning their shopping cart. Renowned e-commerce sites quantify the impact of loading speed on their turnover.

For Amazon, when its load time increases by 100 ms, 0.1 seconds, it is a loss of 1% of sales, which would have represented in 2016 a loss of 1.360 billion euros. For Shopzilla, when it spends its loading time of 7 to 2 seconds, it is a gain of 7 to 12% of turnover and more. Etam, reported in 2015 a 20% gain in its conversion rate following a decrease in the average loading time of its pages by 0.7 seconds.

 

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