It is not a surprise to anyone. As technology improves and our lives get busier, we expect everything to be delivered FAST! Impatience is just one of the many reasons why website speed is critical.
How often have you texted someone and then you keep looking at your phone every minute to see if they have replied? Websites are the same. If you are looking for information and the website loads slowly you will go somewhere else.
According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.
Here are more load time facts and stats to ponder over (source: kissmetrics.com):
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
- 51% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 64% of mobile users expect a page to load in less than four seconds
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
So, given the importance of speed, we put our own website, FarmersMarketing.ca, to the test. As you will see our speed was lacking. In fact, we scored 55/100 on mobile and 76/100 on a desktop. What is interesting is the site is not large, nor does it have hi-resolution photos (uploaded by accident) or a lot of moving parts. Despite it not having the fat many established websites have, the site still had a lot of room for improvement.
We put our team to work and look what happened!
We increased our mobile speed to 93/100 and desktop to 95/100! That is a significant increase. There are a few points to go still, but there is diminishing return beyond this point. The big gains are already received. Many times, as in this case, getting the last 5 points take more time than adding the last 40 points. Similar to learning a language, the first 90% of the language is one thing, but mastering the final 10% can take decades.
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Here is a website speed PRO TIP:
Minify (or Tinyfy) Every Image File! This is the easiest change that you can make to improve your website speed while not needing coding or Photoshop skills. EVERY time that you are uploading an image file to your website or blog, go to TinyPng.com first. All you do is click and drag the photo into their tool and it magically shrinks the files size. From our experience, TinyPng.com shrinks the photo size by 70% (by megabytes) without reducing the pixel size or image quality. Now imagine how much faster that can make your site, especially when compounded over years of posts!
If you are not the one making technical changes to your site, it is critical to understand how important site speed is. Anytime someone does web work for you, ensure that they understand that one of your main goals is website speed. If they don’t feel website speed is important, go find a new web developer immediately.