Whether you are an expert in e-commerce, marketing or SEO / SEA, you have one thing in common: a high concern for UX. And you should! Did you know that a website’s loading time is what really counts for users?
UX is an essential issue for the user who visits your e-commerce website and who discovers your brand’s DNA! Fast loading times for desktop and mobile browsing contribute to a quality experience, which turns in favour of high conversion rates.
Benefits of a fast pacing website for your business
Considering that:
- 53% of mobile users will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and 49% of users who meet a loading issue during a transaction will leave the website and potentially purchase from a competitor;
- 88% of French Internet users will not come back on a website if they consider it is too slow
... it becomes clear that slow loading times are a real risk for UX and therefore for business. Web performance must be a priority for IT teams as well as for marketing and e-commerce teams.
Beyond UX, the benefits of a fast website are plentiful:
- SEO
Speed has become a landing page criteria for Google, which recommends not to exceed 1000 ms Speed Index. Since 2018, the search engine also implements this system to mobile uses in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Even though it may not be the only ranking criterion, do not neglect your loading times … at least for the sake of your online visitors, as mentioned above.
- Traffic
Be aware that a landing page that loads in 5 seconds will have a bounce rate twice as high (+ 105%) as if it were in 1 second. A fast site is the guarantee of keeping your visitors online.
- Conversion rate
One extra second in loading time equals 12% less conversion. Caring for your web performance means caring for your conversion rate! Our customers attest to this, IKKS and Petit Bateau for example who respectively improved their conversion rates by 20% on mobile and by 10% on all devices.
- Customer satisfaction
One second of extra loading time equals 16% less satisfaction. Also note that 27% of users abandon their shopping cart if the website takes too much time to load.
Loading time is essential in a digital strategy. Do you know the basics of "loading time"?
All you need to know about “loading time”
Loading time depends on several elements. Which page is your user viewing? With what browser? Is it his first visit? Are there any elements already in the cache? Is the connection ADSL, fiber, 3G or 4G? Is the connection done via computer or mobile?
Depending on each of these elements, the loading time may differ.
The measurement of loading time is a complicated calculation, furthermore because of the large amount of data.
Here are the 3 most important metrics from a UX point of view.
- Speed Index is the average time at which visible parts of the page are displayed. Unlike loading time, which takes into account the display of the entire page, Speed Index evaluates the display speed of each visible element of a page.
- The Time To First Byte (TTFB) measures the moment when your browser receives the first byte, in other words the moment it receives a first piece of code to interpret. The TTFB is connected with the performance of your Back-End since it matches the ability of your server to return the first byte. According to a study conducted by Moz.com, the TTFB has a direct impact on the SEO of a website. NB: The loading time of a website is divided into 2 parts. The Back-End (server response time) and the Front-End (element display time).
- The Start Render is the moment when something first displays on the user's blank white screen. It has a direct impact on the speed perception: the faster the Start Render, the better the user speed perception. Thus, the overall loading time of your page (or loadEventEnd) does not allow to draw conclusions and should not be your first reference to improve your user experience.
When we look at a Waterfall, like the one below (i.e. the visual representation of the loading of the various elements of a web site), we see that the Front-End represents between 80 and 90% of the loading time of a page. A good reason to concentrate on that, right?
How to improve your website’s loading times?
CLOSER CONTENT: CDN
The best-known solutions are the Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which automatically duplicate your content on servers anywhere in the world. CDNs bring your content closer to your users. For instance if you publish content in France, it will be automatically duplicated on a server in Melbourne for Australian Internet users who will then be able to download it faster. In summary, a CDN is useful for users located far away from your original server, it will accelerate the loading time of your data.
IMPROVE CONTENT AND CODE: FASTERIZE
Fasterize is classified as a "Front-End Optimization" tool: it offers best practices to implement on a website so that loading time is optimized.
How does it actually work? Fasterize implements best coding practices to websites. Our tool offers a range of features to intelligently automate your web performance optimizations, to ensure a fast website, anywhere, all the time, while saving time and resources.
Want to know more about webperf and how to improve your loading times ?
