Speed is among the most important aspects of a website. Sure, without good content you can’t even hope to attract visitors. However, if your site is too slow, nobody will wait to see the content. We live in fast times and everyone expects websites to load almost instantly. However, research shows that site owners often overestimate the speed of their websites. Consequently, the average website is much slower than recommended—about three times slower, in fact.

Luckily, the experts at the Hosting Tribunal don’t just deliver top notch hosting reviews, but also useful infographics like the one below that contain all the essential facts you need to know about website speed. With it, you’ll never again wonder if long load times are hurting your website. It covers the many aspects of how speed affects website performance. It also backs up the statistics with real-life examples. We will outline each of the aspects to give you a better idea about the massive impact of website speed.

Bounce Rates

Bounce rates refer to the number of people who find your site and leave after visiting only one page. Higher bounce rates mean fewer page views and worse search rankings. Unfortunately, long load times make your bounce rate soar. If your load times go from 1 second to 5 seconds, your bounce rate increases by 90%. 39% of visitors will bounce even if it is just the images that take long to load.

Reduced Traffic

This aspect is directly connected to the high bounce rates. Load times directly correlate with traffic. In fact, each second of added delay results is 11% drop in page views. Even a fraction of a second can matter. 0.4 seconds of lag can decrease traffic by 0.44%

User Experience

This part of the infographic shows that even the visitors who stay are not too happy about slow speeds. 75% of visitors avoid pages that take over 4 seconds to load and 44% of all users tell others to do the same. Even when they stay, users visit fewer pages if a website is slow. Web surfers visit an average of 8.9 pages if the load times are around 2 seconds. If the load time is 8 seconds, they visit only 3.3 pages on average.

Customer Experience

The influence of speed on online stores is perhaps the most striking. The first important statistic is that each second of delay directly reduces customer satisfaction by 16%. Dissatisfied customers have a 64% likelihood of avoiding your store and a 43% likelihood of going straight to your competitor’s site.

Believe it or not, long load times are the reason behind shopping cart abandonment in 51% of the cases. If you think this is serious, wait until you see the numbers in the infographic—the cost of abandoned carts worldwide amounts to $18 billion annually. In other words, slow speed contributes to about half of these massive losses.

All in all, if you’re a business owner, each second of delay on your e-commerce site will reduce your conversions by 7%. So if your load times average at 9.3 seconds, which is the average for most sites, you lose between 40-45% of potential revenue right off the bat.

Success Stories

Finally, we can mention the results the top websites recorded. Namely, Google projected that a mere 0.5 seconds added to their load times would cost them 25% of searches. It might seem ridiculous that half of a second can do this, but Google’s load times are particularly low. 0.5 seconds is 125% of their load time.

Yahoo! actually gained 9% more traffic by reducing their load times by 0.4 seconds. SmartFurniture.com achieved a 20% increase in organic search traffic by reducing their load times. For Bing, 2 seconds of delay equal 3.75% loss in potential clicks.

As for ecommerce websites, Amazon estimated 1 second of added delay would cost them $1.6 billion annually. Walmart grew their revenue incrementally by up to 1% for every 0.1 seconds of improvement. AliExpress reduced their load times by 36%. This resulted in 10.5% more orders and a 27% higher conversion rate for new customers.

Page Speed Conclusion and Author Bio

This useful page speed infographic both shows the key facts about website speed and illustrates why speed is one of the most important factors in a website’s success. So, if you’re a website owner or if you’re just interested in learning more about how the world of the internet works, this is the infographic for you.

Josh Wardini, Editorial Contributor and Community Manager at HostingTribunal.com. With a preliminary background in communication and expertise in community development, Josh works day-to-day to reshape the human resource management of digitally based companies. When his focus trails outside of community engagement, Josh enjoys the indulgences of writing amidst the nature conservations of Portland, Oregon.

 

How Speed Affects Your Website Inforgraphic