Website loading times that happen quickly don’t just bring about a more enjoyable individual experience – they can also have a noticeable effect on the success of the website.
Rapid loading times contribute to an improved user experience, ultimately resulting in a longer time spent on the website, more pages viewed, and an increase in profitable transactions. Google has begun to give precedence to websites that offer great usability, considering elements such as how fast the page loads and how mobile-friendly the content is, in the process of ordering search results.
How Is Your Mobile Website Performing?
Chances are, it’s barely passing.
The study conducted by HubSpot Research reveals that the majority of websites are not functioning properly. We discovered that the common loading duration when looking at these sites was nearly four seconds, an amount that is enough to make numerous guests to leave and search for other websites.
The study showed that webpages earned an average D grade for speed. One of the leading causes of long loading times is images and videos. Often, websites are not optimized so that pictures and videos load quickly when they are being viewed on a mobile device.
Reflect for a second on the breathtaking, high-definition image likely used on your website’s main page. Doesn’t this embody your brand or product perfectly?
The image may be visually appealing, but due to it having a large file size, your website may be taking a while to load, leading to an unsatisfactory experience for those accessing your website on a mobile device.
Why Fast Loading Times Matter
Prior to us delving into the techniques for quickening your website’s loading time, let us discuss why having quick loading speeds is so imperative.
Slow Loading Times Stress Out Your Visitors
It is logical that prolonged loading speeds would irritate visitors to your website, causing a drop in conversion rate and a negative outlook on your brand. Did you realize that the result of this is an increased heart rate and stress levels? The Ericsson Mobility report in 2016 indicated that a single lag in web page loading resulted in an average 38% spike in heart rate.
It is difficult to measure a rise of 38% in the heart rate – especially if one does not pay attention to it frequently. Recall the last time you were in a stressful situation such as viewing a scary film. The mobile load times are taking just as long as it felt to watch that scary movie.
As marketers, we do not want visitors to be unhappy when they are looking at our content, or checking out our product or service.
Visitors May Blame You for Their Bad Experience
In certain situations, when website viewers come across a lag in loading time, they hold their cellular provider responsible for inadequate service. The more time that passes, the more responsibility for the holdup is yours as the creator of the content.
The Ericsson study also conducted an NPS survey among their customers to find out where they attribute responsibility when there are issues with their mobile services – whether they tend to blame the provider or the source of the content.
For the customers included in the research that had no wait time for the mobile website, their assessment of their mobile service supplier shot up significantly (growing by 4.5 points) on the NPS scale. But consumers who experienced a delay in the service began to blame the service provider; and the longer the wait, the lesser the responsibility was placed on the provider and more on the creators of the website.
Website Loading Times: Statistics And Impact
There were over 4 billion site visits within the past 12 months to research issues that can delay website loading, so as to spot the main cause of poor loading rates and improve the success of your webpage.
But first: Why fast website loading times are absolutely crucial
The speed of a website can have a drastic impact on user experience and functioning. Here are some key website loading time statistics that are important to know:
- A website loading speed on mobile of 10 seconds increases the bounce rate by 123% when compared to a one-second loading speed (according to a Google Industry Mobile Speed report).
- Google Consumer Insights also found that 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.[3]
- Website conversion rates drop by 4.42% with each second of load time that goes by, between zero and five seconds, according to an experiment by tech agency Portant.[4]
- Almost 70% of consumers have said that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer, a page speed report found.[5]
It is evidently critical to online retail customers and visitors that website loading times are fast. Making this optimization on your webpage is an excellent way to boost the number of conversions, and it can aid in resolving the bounce rate issues your website is having.
Website Loading Times Report
- The average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile, based on our analysis of the top 100 web pages worldwide. The average desktop First Input Delay (FID) speed is 12.73 milliseconds on desktop and 59.73 milliseconds on mobile.
- Webpages on mobile take on average 70.9% longer to load than on desktop.
- Across all websites, mobile users have an average bounce rate of 56.8%, desktop users have an average bounce rate of 50% and tablet users have a 51.6% bounce rate.
- From our analysis of 4 billion web pages, people using a desktop have the highest average pages per session of 3.4.
- The science industry has the highest bounce rate with 66.37% on mobile devices.
- The sports industry has over 200 million sessions year-on-year on mobile, the most out of any industry.
- Retail sites get an average of 5.01 pages per session on desktop: the highest out of the 23 industries analyzed.
- Out of all 3 electronics (mobile, desktop, and tablet), the tablet has the lowest number of sessions year over year of 2.3%.
The study comes in three parts:
- First, we analyzed and collected information from Google benchmarking reports, where we were able to compare loading speed data reports released by other companies to contextualize our findings.
- Secondly, we analyzed the speed and performance of over 400 websites that were built with the top 12 website builders.
- Thirdly, we analyzed the top 100 web pages of the most popular websites worldwide, gaining insight into their Core Web Vitals, load speeds, and bounce rates, to see what makes them so successful in their performance, and how you can speed up your site to match their success.
How Website Loading Speed Impacts Businesses
If your site’s loading speed is considerably slower than average, or any stage takes notably more time than the predetermined standard, it could have a detrimental effect on your ranking, transformation rate, and website visits.
We’re here to give an explanation of the potential causes of load speed problems, as well as how to solve the problem if it should come up.
How does website loading speed impact SEO?
Google’s ranking of your page is affected by the user experience, so if your site takes a long time to load, it can be difficult to get organic traffic. Moreover, if your page loading time is sluggish, this could bring about an increased bounce rate for your website, as customers might opt to not stick around for it to be fully done loading and instead just go away. For every extra second, it takes your website to load, conversions may drop by 17%, which can lead to losses in money and leads from the shoppers who remain on your site.
What affects website load speed?
Website load speed is affected by many different factors. All aspects of a website such as HTML code, JavaScript files, images, videos, external scripts, and website servers can affect the rate at which it loads. A considerable amount of images that have not been optimized can often be the major cause of a loading issue, as well as overusing widgets and plugins.
How to improve website load speed
It could be different factors that are causing a website to load slowly, so when attempting to make the website more efficient, there are multiple steps to take. Here are some tips on how to improve website load speed:
- Be prepared to spend more on your web hosting. Cheaper ones can often lead to poor performance, slowing the speed of your site down.
- Optimize images. By reducing the file sizes and compressing the images, your site won’t have to work so hard to load, speeding the process up. A good start is our Free Image Compressor.
- Get rid of unnecessary redirects. Too many can make loading times much slower, so if you notice there are more than there should be in operation, eliminating them can be a quick fix for a slow site.
- Remove unnecessary plugins. Too many can significantly slow your site down. Disable any you don’t currently use and check if there are any with overlapping functions that can be combined into one. You could also run the plugins one by one in order to identify the one slowing your site down the most.
- Optimize the code. By removing unnecessary commas, spaces, unused code, comments, and formatting, you can dramatically improve your site’s loading speed.
Want to build a fast-running website from scratch? ToolTester provides the necessary instruments to boost the speed of website loading and create attractive websites that won’t impede your patrons.
5 Ways to Make Your Mobile Website Faster
A lot of elements contribute to how quickly your mobile website loads, but here are the five primary components that affect performance.
1) Determine how your mobile website is set up.
Do you have a website specifically designed for mobile devices (e.g. m.exampledomain.com) or does your website automatically adjust itself depending on the device being used?
Google suggests using responsive design as their go-to method, with the possibility of optimizing your mobile website performance, depending on its configuration.
2) Compress your images.
Do you recall the lovely product or brand image I quoted in the beginning that could be impeding your website’s speed? If you reduce the size of that picture, it could quicken the amount of time it takes for your page to load. The largest cause of slow loading times for websites is often their abundance of images; hence, it is recommended that this is the initial issue to address.
As an illustration, if the product picture is shown on a page with a size of 500 x 500 pixels, the real size of the image document is 3500 x 3500 pixels. That image is probably a several-megabyte file. Whenever it’s used on a website, the visitor’s browser is made to download the 3500-pixel version before resizing it to the correct size, which all happens as the page is loading. This phenomenon is common when working on desktop computers, yet it usually passes by so fast that it goes unnoticed.
For mobile devices, particularly those with a cellular signal, loading a full-size image can be very slow and cause a lot of annoyance to users. Look into reducing the size, cutting out parts, and squeezing the size of your images to fix the issue.
3) Minify all code, especially JavaScript.
The process of eliminating superfluous figures without impacting the website’s capability is known as “code compression”. Its effect on the length of time it takes for a web page’s code to be processed is immense, thus making your website display quicker on any type of technology, both desktop and mobile.
You may want to reach out to someone from your website or development team to reduce your code since this procedure requires you to modify the code of the website specifically. It is optimal if you can delete some JavaScript (or another coding) from the mobile adaptations of webpages to make them faster.
4) Load videos in the background (or not at all).
Mobile load times are likely to be the longest when dealing with videos, as they are usually the biggest element on web pages. If the video is not essential for the user’s experience, think about keeping it out of view or not loading it at all. By placing videos in the back of the website, the perception of how quickly it loads will be improved; however, this could not be the answer to the problem of a mobile site loading too slowly.
If you have lengthy videos that explain your services or products, you may consider using a call-to-action rather than keeping the video on the website. That way, those who are using mobile devices can conveniently email the video to themselves so they can watch it at a later time. This will help to save time in the immediate future, and drastically improve the experience for people browsing with their mobile devices.
5) Take advantage of the cache and speed benefits of a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
CDNs are useful in improving user experience on the internet by caching and loading content on various servers across the world, regardless of the user’s device and location. Without a CDN, you are unlikely to experience the improved performance that is associated with the service. We suggest that you look into taking advantage of the benefits offered by a CDN.
Marketers have a lot to lose if their websites don’t both look and work well. Having a website that loads quickly on mobile devices will help stop visitors from leaving and will prevent any increase in stress that they may experience while visiting, which could be similar to the feeling they get while watching a scary movie. You can apply these pieces of advice immediately to begin increasing the efficiency of your desktop and cellular website.
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