The earlier you get information, the earlier you can make decisions, and the more successful your business will be. Your website is an information resource, and speed is an essential factor in its success. This is because a fast-loading website can boost user satisfaction by up to 16%; however, a slow website can chase away potential customers and decrease sales. In this article, we will discuss how desktop and mobile site speed influences conversion rates and why this factor is essential for any online business.
What Is a Website’s Conversion Rates?
Website conversion rate is the percentage of people who came to the site and completed the desired action: left a feedback form, made a purchase, put the product in the cart, subscribed to the newsletter, left an address to join the waiting list, etc. For example, if for every 100 visitors, only 5 sign up for your newsletter, your website conversion rate is 5% – the market average. Of course, this figure can be influenced, and site speed precisely allows you to optimize the conversion rate of your site and the efficiency of your business.
Impact of Site Speed on Conversion Rates
Many factors affect conversion rates – from your site’s layout to your products’ actual descriptions. Let’s explore how page speed impacts various performance indicators.
Bounce Rate
Bounce RateThe bounce rate shows the percentage of people who come to your site and leave without clicking on other pages. High rates indicate that many people leave the site and probably cannot find what they are looking for, or the site loads too long. A website that takes time to load might irritate users, and they may leave the site before even engaging with the content.
Session Length
Another metric influenced by page load time is session length – the time users spend on your site. This metric includes recurring sessions of one individual user, which may indicate they’re willing to return to your resource.
Usually, pages with faster load time will make the user spend more time on the site and view more pages, increasing engagement with your products and services. On the other hand, a long loading time can scare users away, shortening both the session time and the chances of conversion.
SEO Rankings
Most search engines, such as Google, consider the user experience as one of the most critical factors in their ranking parameters. They do this through specific indicators called Core Web Vitals, of which page load time is one of the parameters.
A faster page load time tends to result in better results in these areas, positively impacting the ranking and traffic from organic search. This directly impacts your conversion rate, as when your website appears more frequently in the search results, it attracts more traffic.
To ensure that your website has no technical issues, especially connected with site speed and Core Web Vitals, use the SE Ranking site audit to identify all the problems in a single view. Just add your website URL and get the site health score, issues found by categories, and fixing recommendations.
Mobile Optimization
Given that mobile searches have become more frequent than desktop searches, mobile page speed is critical. Customers want a uniform experience, and if the mobile page speed is unsatisfactory and slow, the user will leave the site. To increase the conversion rates, it is crucial to optimize the website for mobile page speed as it meets the users’ expectations. You can use free tools such as Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to learn if your site speed optimization is good for mobile.
Business Credibility
Although it is somewhat intangible, site speed affects your business’s credibility as well. To dissect websites by reliability and trustworthiness of the content, Google introduced an Information Satisfaction (IS) score evaluated by human reviewers, who manually rank sites based on their originality, completeness, relevance, and user experience (including site speed.)
A website that is easy to navigate and fast-loading looks more professional. On the other hand, a slow site can give a client the impression that the business is not reliable, and they might not make a purchase.
Customer Loyalty
The speed of your site plays the middleman between you and the visitors and tells you if they will visit your site again or not. Users usually prefer a faster site, and hence, they are likely to be more satisfied and loyal to the site. This also makes the customers happy and increases their chances of coming back to your site, making a repeat purchase, or even recommending your site to others, thus increasing your conversion rates.
All these factors illustrate why site speed is an important variable that has to be taken into consideration when it comes to conversion rate optimization, or CRO for short.
How to Speed Up Your Website?
Improving site speed not only affects user satisfaction but also greatly affects the profit of your business. Below are some tips on how you can enhance the page speed and conversion rate metrics:
- Minimize the file size of the JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files. This entails optimizing the code, the comments, and other spaces that are not useful in rendering the page. Reducing the code that you have will reduce the overall size of your site, and hence, the site will load faster.
- Remove unnecessary plugins. One more factor that you should take into consideration is the analysis of the usage of plugins. There can be so many of them, and this can greatly slow down your site. Always try to turn off any plugin that is not essential in the effective running of the website. Ensure that you check out the plugins that you have on your website and either deactivate or remove those that are of no use to your website.
- Use cashing. Caching techniques are also useful in enhancing the speed of a given site and thus should be embraced. Caching is the technique of storing some of the files of your site temporarily, and when a particular user comes back to your site, the website loads faster because the data is pulled from the cache. This can greatly help in cutting down on the load time for the pages and thus, the user experience of a website or an application.
- Resize your images. Compress your images and adjust their size to ensure that your website takes less time to load. This includes reducing the sizes of images to have small file sizes yet with high quality. Numerous tools and plugins can be used to optimize images and keep the average page load time as low as possible.
Summary
Site speed and page load time directly impact conversion rate optimization, user experience, and the success of your online business. Shopify finds that a site speed improvement of 1 second can boost conversions by 27%. A fast website performance helps decrease bounce rates, increase the time that users spend on the site, improve the search engine position, increase the optimization level for mobile devices, and gain users’ trust.
All the steps shown above contribute to a faster, more efficient, and more pleasant experience for the user of the site. This leads to a raised level of conversions and an audience that is happy to return to you.
Thus, spending time and money on optimizing your website’s speed is an excellent way to contribute to the further development of your business.
