The Need for Speed: Reduce your bounce rates and optimize your website for speed

business.com ENEED SPEED THE FOR REDUCE YOUR BOUNCE RATES, OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR SPEED No matter what kinds of sales, promotions, or content you have on your website, if the page isn't loading fast enough, your visitors are going to navigate away and not come back 25% of users will abandon a website after 3 seconds of delay - and the longer that delay lasts, the more customers you'll lose to your competitors Impacts of delayed page load time A 1-second delay in page load time means 7% 11% 16% reduction reduction reduction in conversions in page views in customer satisfaction Example bing found 4.3% reduction in revenue that a 2-second delay led to a per visitor Example 2 Another site launched a side-by-side comparison of their optimized vs. un-optimized website The optimized site boasted 13.38% 15.64 0:30:10 average time on site bounce rate pages per visit compared to the non-optimized site 14.35% 11.04 0:23:50 average time on site bounce rate pages per visit The optimized site's conversion rate improved by 16.07% and the value of each purchase increased by 5.51% Example 3 Eshopzilla opümized their site to reduce page load times from 6 sec to 1.2 sec The site experienced a revenue increase of 5-12%* 75% of customers would rather shop at a competitor's site than suffer delays on your site and 88% are less likely to return to your site after a bad experience The causes of page load delays Factors that influence your page load time include Number of images Size and Format of images Object, Flash, and Javascript and any other elements that eat up large amounts of bandwidth. Even your code itself can cause your site to run slowly Make sure that your site's code and graphics are optimized for speed. If you want customers to stay on your site long enough to make a purchase you need to ensure that your page load time is short enough not to negatively affect customer satisfaction To increase your website's conversion rate Optimize website's code Reduce Increase for availability, usability, and speed page load times availability of your website Additional benefits to optimize for speed performance Businesses who optimize their websites for speed - by improving web content performance, monitoring their server, and optimizing their code - had fewer complaints about response time compared with companies who did not optimize their websites 17% They were more aware of how their site was performing, more likely to identify issues with their site's response time, and more likely to correlate the performance of their site with actual business processes Optimized sites were These proactive businesses also saw 80% 72% less customer dissatisfaction more likely to be able to associate web transactions with business processes regarding the usability of the site compared to non-optimized sites 20% They were 77% more transactions were error-free more likely to identify sources of issues or delays within their site's response time for optimized sites as compared to non-optimized 46% of these businesses had very or extremely satisfied customers 37% for non-optimized Optimizing your website for speed doesn't just benefit your bounce rate and conversion rate. The process makes your site's functionality more transparent to IT and business managers The results – higher availability, greater usability, and faster load times - greatly reduce customer dissatisfaction and make your site far more likely to have extremely satisfied customers Items to review before creating a website or with your current site Questions to ask of your web design: Is it comparable to how competitors and industry leaders' sites perform (speed, usability, availability)? Can you ensure that customers share a consistent experience of your site (across browser types, locations, etc)? Can you quantify how your website's performance impacts your conversion rates and bounce rates? Do you have a common set of measures and metrics that make your site's performance a shared responsibility of both IT and business professionals? If your site isn't loading fast enough, time to find someone who can help *Source : Aberdeen group, Reaching the Top of the Web Performance Mountain, May 2013 Gomez, Why Web Perfomance Matters: Is Your Site Driving Customers Away? Aberdeen group, Reaching the Top of the Web Performance Mountain, May 2013 business.com