How Big A Priority Is Page Load Time?

Before you start A/B testing, one of the things you need to do is to ensure that your website speed is running with optimal conditions. As a business, site speed can make or break your chances on being successful. Having slow speeds can turn off potential customers in a matter of seconds. The internet is a big place, and if one page is not cutting it, there are literally hundreds more that will. All it takes is a few seconds of lag, and you lose your business.

In a recent webinar hosted by Convert, Yottaa‘s conversion marketing specialist – Lucy Orloski – conveys the impact of site speed in conversion, user engagement, and revenue. In other words, they conveyed the importance of having a fast site so that you can have paying customers to keep your business profitable. For more information, you can watch the entire webinar here.

Lucy Orloski has been doing conversion marketing for about 8 years now. In the past, she’s worked on large-scale SEM, and spent three and a half years at a company called HubSpot. Today though, she’s working with Yottaa to help businesses speed up their websites, increase conversion, user engagement and revenue. Yottaa’s primary product is user engagement styles, a cloud service that offers to speed up sites to increase the aforementioned functions. Their list of customers branch from all verticals, but particularly are from the e-commerce and financial service sectors. The other issue that was covered during the webinar involves a lot of data and specifics namely: things that are not at the top of the mind for most people.

Speed Matters

Most people are concerned about the different variables that can be changed to increase conversion rates (conversion is the marketing technique on turning casual visitors or traffic into paying customers) or lower the abandonment rates, or even in increasing the overall sales revenues. Often times, we think about web elements that affect our conversion. These factors include,

• Calls to Action
• Page Structure
• Navigation
• Copy (website text)
• Position

We have thought of ways we can improve them. But rarely will you find a marketer talk about how they’re working on improving their page load speed. And when you do hear it, it’s generally only in the context of someone running an AdWords campaign where Google has shown them that their landing pages are quite slow. Which means that this is clearly on the search engine’s radar as well: they want the pages to be fast for users too.

[Tweet “Around 47% of all consumers expect a maximum page load time of 2 seconds.”]

Speed Improves Conversion

This brings us to page load speed. With that information in mind, what this means is that page load time should be a big priority. Page load speed may not be the thing that changes your conversion rate from 5% to 40%, but it can be the thing that changes your conversion from 5% to 10%, 15%, or even 20%. This will also give you a good, solid baseline which you can go and start experimenting with some of the other more traditional variables to increase revenue.

As Goran Candrlic states in his article – How Website Speed Affects Conversion Rates,

Whether your customers are there for a pretty interface, clear privacy policies, for the best bargain, or simply because they have found exactly what they were looking for, they had to get there in the first place, and quickly. If you could cut that path to your website even shorter, and this is a matter of milliseconds, you could convert more visits to actual orders.

So, if you haven’t checked that box on your list, always bear in mind that it is a very important one to think about. What’s more, not many marketers think about it, so if you do, you will be gaining an edge over your competitors. If you want to learn more about this, or if you want to view the full presentation, you can watch its entirety here.

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