The Importance of Mobile Site Speed

It’s no surprise that we can easily be frustrated by a website or mobile page that takes forever to load. The most patient of us may wait a few seconds, perhaps try to refresh the page a couple of times, then move on quickly. In today’s mobile age, we don’t really have a lot of patience for slow sites, because we can just as easily go back to our search results and pick the next in the list. A study conducted in 2014 examining the attitudes of mobile Internet users concluded that the impact of even a 1-second delay can be more detrimental to your business than you may have imagined.

After 5 seconds, 15% of mobile users abandon the page. Another 5 seconds go by, 30% have abandoned the cause. Give it another 10 seconds, and more than 60% of users have left your site. Just imagine how this could affect your business!

If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost $2.5 million lost in sales every year. (Source: Webbymonks)

Just like how a bad user experience follows from a slow loading page, having a poorly performing page can have a dramatic effect on your ROI. Most mobile users expect a browsing experience that’s comparable to what they get on a desktop computer. In 2010, Google announced that speed was going to be a new signal factoring into their organic search-ranking algorithm, leaving marketers and web designers to find new solutions to improve the mobile surfing experience for others.

How Can You Improve your Site Speed?

There are a number of ways in which a mobile website can be developed or modified with speed performance in mind. Some general guidelines are to ensure that code is clean, to avoid excessive plugins or complex tracking codes, to compress files and images, and other web development strategies.

If you are considering updating your web design to improve your site’s speed, here are some of the main benefits that it provides:

• Improving your SEO score and search visibility
• Improving your brand experience, and encouraging word of mouth referrals
• Increasing satisfaction and customer loyalty
• Enabling faster checkouts
• Conversion rate increases 74% when page load time improves from 8 to 2 seconds

You can measure your mobile site speed in a web performance and SEO report generated by the folks at Absolute Marketing Solutions. Call us at (813) 908-6862 to meet with the Digital Marketing team to discuss your web strategy today!