Consumers who find themselves waiting more than a few seconds for a website page to load are more likely to abandon the page. They expect to see results quickly and are disappointed when they don't. They may even see a slow website as a reflection of how your business is run.

Conversely, recent studies have shown that fast page-load speed leads to more conversions. In other words, the faster a webpage loads, the more likely a consumer is to perform the targeted action on that webpage.

Page-load time is one of the most critical ingredients for a good user experience — it’s potentially a make-or-break factor for a website’s success. Optimized site speed helps you drive more traffic and avoid high bounce rates, especially on mobile sites.

Here are some statistics that further validate the importance of page-load speed

A 1-second delay in page-loading can lead to an 11% drop in page views, a 7% drop in conversion rates and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction (Aberdeen Group).
The BBC discovered it lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second its website took to load.
Pinterest grew its search engine traffic and signups by 15% by reducing wait times by 40%.
COOK increased conversions by 7%, decreased bounce rates by 7%, and increased pages per session by 10% by reducing the average page-load time by 850 milliseconds.

The Need for Speed: How Page-Load Speed Impacts Purchase Decisions

How to Test Page-Load Speed

Regular audits are crucial for catching bottlenecks and improving customer experience. The following data points play a major role in a webpage speed audit:

Time taken to first byte (TTFB)
Performance of CDN (content delivery network)
Website performance across different geo-locations
Webpage-rendering speed in different browsers
Page-load times, size, and total number of requests
Large images/videos that cause bottlenecks
Possibility of webpage caching for static content
Duplicate scripts and 404 Not Found pages
Scripts that have a potential for minification
Unused scripts in the code/DOM
Scripts, fonts, and plugins that cause load-time issues
Gzip components

How to Identify Latent Customer Needs

Companies can find consumer demands that are unknown even to customers themselves by learning from their market experiences and observing the experiences of collaborators and rivals. Doing so can improve the odds of creating a popular product. Read more.

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Several tools can help measure page speed and performance. They run on predefined algorithms and provide detailed reports of performance and the likely reasons behind poor results. They also offer suggestions for achieving faster load times.

Google PageSpeed Insights
Google Lighthouse
WebPageTest
GTmetrix
Pingdom
Dareboost&MAXCDN

Conclusion

Customer attention spans are at an all-time low, and purchase decisions are impacted by millisecond delays. Pages with slow loading times can cause customers to discard their purchase journey and go to your competitors’ sites.

The bottom line is, speed does matter! The faster your website loads the better user experience your visitors will have. Improving page loading speed is a tangible way to enhance the user experience for businesses. Optimize your e-commerce site by enhancing your site load speed, and see your metrics rapidly improve.

About TA Digital

TA Digital is the only global boutique agency that delivers the “best of both worlds” to clients seeking to achieve organizational success through digital transformation. Unlike smaller, regional agencies that lack the ability to scale or large organizations that succumb to a quantity-over-quality approach, we offer resource diversity while also providing meticulous attention to the details that enable strategic success.

Over the past 20 years, TA Digital has positioned clients to achieve digital maturity by focusing on data, customer-centricity, and exponential return on investment; by melding exceptional user experience and data-driven methodologies with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we enable digital transformations that intelligently build upon the strategies we set into motion. We are known as a global leader that assists marketing and technology executives in understanding the digital ecosystem while identifying cultural and operational gaps within their business – ultimately ushering organizations toward a more mature model and profitable digital landscape.

Recognized in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, TA Digital is pleased also to share high-level strategic partnerships with world class digital experience platform companies like Adobe, SAP, Acquia, commercetools, Sitecore, and Elastic Path.