The consideration of a site’s traffic, which is the number of visitors to a website and to specific pages on the website, is where webpage performance metrics are often based on.
Though the vital measurement of performance, which affects a site’s traffic and engagement, is the website speed.
The following website speed statistics offer some interesting insight into how people interact with slow loading sites and the consequences of websites that have not optimised their site for a fast and effective experience for online users.
Website Speed Statistics 2024 (Conversions, Bonuses + Averages)
Key Website Speed Statistics
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 53% of online visitors will leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- 73% of Internet users on their mobiles report that they’ve been on a website that they would consider as ‘too slow’ to load.
- 51% of Internet users on their mobiles report that they’ve encountered a website that froze, crashed or received an error of some kind.
- 38% of mobile Internet users have been directed to websites that weren’t available.
- A delay of just one second can result in a reduction of 7% conversion rate for some websites.
Research on Website Speed for Businesses
Website speeds refer to how quickly pages load, and how effectively people can take the desired action that they intend to take, which is hopefully that same action that the host wants them to take.
The general consensus is that the faster the webpage loads, the more chances are that conversion will happen. Below are website speed statistics from past studies that will offer beneficial data for any individual or company looking to boost their website’s performance.
- The website speed test site Pingdom reports that from millions of speed tests performed on their site, the average load time of a webpage is 3.21 seconds, with most websites experiencing a bounce rate rise to 38% as soon as the load time hits 5 seconds and more.
- Ancestory.com put the performance metrics of their website speed to the test in 2016, noting that there was a positive rise of 7% in their conversions after the improved the render load time of their webpages by 68%.
- 2016 also saw the company AliExpress claiming that reducing their load time for their site pages by 36% resulted in an increase of 10.5% in orders and a 27% conversion rate increase for new customers.
- In 2016, the site FT.com sped up their site resulting in 30% more engagement with their website pages.
- In 2017, Pinterest optimised their performance to result in a 40% decrease in wait time, a 15% organic traffic increase and a 15% sign up conversion rate increase.
- In 2017, the BBC webpage claimed that they lose 10% of additional users who come to their site for every additional second their site takes to load.
- In 2018, the online store Missguided removed their plugin BazaarVoice for the android mobile visitors, which created an increase of 4 seconds speed in the load time and an estimated increase of 26% in revenue.
- In 2018, another large e-commerce site, Tokopedia, stated that they were able to create a decrease load time from 14 seconds down to just 2 seconds for 3G connected devices, resulting in a 19% increase in new visitors, 7% increase in new users, and active users (buyers) improving by a jump of 17%.
Average Load Time (Seconds) Website Speed Statistics
As the speed slows, the bounce rate increases. People will visit fewer pages if the pages are loading slower. When the speed increases, they will increase their engagement with the site.
This goes to show that creating a faster website will most definitely be reflected in the engagement of people with your site, and the subsequent actions that will be taking.
- For users with an average website page loading time of 2 seconds, the bounce rate is below 10%.
- For users with a page load average of 3 seconds, the bounce rate is 13%.
- With 3-4 seconds of loading time, the bounce rate jumps to 17%.
- For an average page load time of 7 seconds, the bounce rate can be as high as 33% or even more.
- The sites that have an average page load time of 2 seconds will get close to 9 pages viewed, on average.
- The 7 second page load time websites have experienced an average of only 3.7 pages, less than half of the engagement of the 5-second faster load times.
- 46% of people surveyed about their online usage state that waiting for a page to load is their number one dislike about growing the web on their mobile.
- Google research claims that for mobile load times, the average is 22 seconds.
- On mobile website viewing, sites that load in 5 seconds, compared with those that load in 19 seconds, will see an average of 70% longer viewing sessions.
- Pages that load within two seconds generally have an average bounce rate of 9%, where pages that load in five seconds have a much higher bounce rate at 38%.
- A representative from Google, Maile Ohye, comments: “2 seconds is the threshold for eCommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half-second.”
Website Speed Impact on Revenue and Conversions
The impact that slow speeds can have on business revenue and conversions is substantial, as you will see in the website speed statistics below. Additionally, it’s valuable to note that mobile sites have much lower engagement metrics than desktop in the areas of average time spent on a site, pages per visit and bounce rate.
This is because everything generally takes a little longer on mobile to load. With a rising rate of online shopping now occurring on mobiles, this is worrying for retailers who have not optimised their sites for mobile users.
- 79% of web consumers who have had trouble with the performance of a website will not return to buy again.
- Skilled.co reports that 47% of customers expect that a website should load in 2 seconds or less.
- Testing to an AI healthcare software company, mPulse Mobile, revealed that pages that were loaded within 2.4 seconds had a 1.9% rate of conversion.
- Pages at 3.3 seconds had 1.5% conversion, and at 4.2 seconds the rate went down to less than 1%. The longer it took, the lower the rate got.
- Similarly, the more companies were tested, and Walmart found that for every 1 second faster load time, conversions increased by 2%, with Mobify finding that each 100ms improvement in the load time of their homepage resulted in more than 1% conversion increase.
- An e-commerce website that enjoys $10 million USD in sales each year has a 2% conversion rate increase with a website load time being faster by just one second, that leads to a $200,000 increase in revenue. This is an interesting note, as it can be put more simply that 1 second faster in load time can equate to a potential of $200,000 more revenue.
- A delay of 1 second: Reduces page views by 11%, decreases customer satisfaction by 16% and decreases conversion rate by 7%
- 20% of shoppers will abandon their cart if the pages are loading too slowly.
- $1.6 Billion was the revenue lost per year for every second of decline in speed site, according to internal testing by Amazon.
- Up to 8 million Google searches would be lost per day if the Google search results took 0.4 seconds longer, estimated by Google.
The Best Website Speed Performance Boosters
Taking into account all of the website speed statistics mentioned in this article, it’s clear that boosting your speed will boost your success with reaching people and making an impact on your website’s performance.
If a page is taking more than 4 seconds to load, then the best thing to do (short-term) would be to optimise the display so that the most revenant information loads within the time frame. The longer-term solution is to cut down the load time altogether. The following techniques are ways to cut the loading time of a site:
– Test your website load time with these three popular sites: GTMetrix, Kingdom, and WebPageTest. You can test your site from the location where the majority of your visitors are from, giving you the best information for how people are experiencing your site. You can test the homepage or other pages on your site by a URL search.
– Reducing images and media on your site is a great way to make your page load faster.
– Add a GZIP compression and enable cache.
– Utilising a CDN can help, as it is a storage system that allows the hosting server some ‘help’ with using location-specific data hosting for those who are coming to view your site. The most popular and simple CDN to use currently is CloudFlare.
– Also, removing any unnecessary redirects through buttons, etc, as well as making smaller files that are HTML, CSS, and JS.
– Update any plugins that you use.
– Updates to the latest version of PHP.
When people abandon a site, this activity is noted by Google algorithms, and it penalises sites that load slower and lead to people leaving the sites without interaction. In the algorithm, it is due to the reasoning that these sites ‘lack value’ with less engagement.
Google ranks these sites lower on the search engine as a result. It’s reported that a one-second delay in loading time for a website can reduce the number of page views by an average of 11%.
Get get tips on how to speed up your website, check out my how to make a website tutorial with speed optimisation tips. Another speed consideration is web hosting. To find the right host for your website, check out my full guide on the top ranked web hosting providers for those in the UK.
References
https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-speed-affects-website/
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/
https://www.directom.com/slow-loading-websites-hurt-businesses/
https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/your-website-design-should-load-in-4-seconds/
https://www.machmetrics.com/speed-blog/average-page-load-times-websites-2018/
https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-page-speed-stats-for-marketers/
https://www.section.io/blog/page-load-time-bounce-rate/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/