Everyone knows it: loading speed is crucial for your visitors’ engagement. Beyond 3 seconds, they lose patience and leave… for your competitors’ pages! Display speed is not just a webperf expert’s concern, it is also a requirement of your users. 75% of them consider loading speed as the most important criterion when browsing the web.
You have less than three seconds to please your customers and make them stay on your pages. Ideally, until the purchase is completed. Web performance is a lever that impacts several of your objectives. At the crossroads of UX, SEO, and your turnover, web performance is also a step closer to a greener web. Here are five benefits to be gained from optimizing the display time of your pages.
1. Reveal the potential of your site thanks to faster pages
Web traffic continues to increase worldwide. And if this reason should be enough to have a site that performs, know that in France, mobile traffic represents 64 % !
To satisfy all these people, you need to have web pages that display quickly. Improving your loading speed means ensuring a better experience for your users on all their devices, especially mobile devices .
A polished UX makes the journey enjoyable, but it is also a way to highlight the efforts of your teams . Indeed, they aim for the best user experience, integrate features that are more or less complicated to set up , ensure that the best visuals are distributed , develop the most impactful campaigns possible , etc.
All these efforts should not be diminished by pages that struggle to display. To reap all the fruits of your work, it is important to optimize your web performance and avoid performance degradation. This is the condition to exploit the full potential of these features!
2. A high-performing site is aligned with browsing trends
With technological advances: the speed of networks with 5G, the features and capabilities of smartphones, more and more Internet users use their mobile phones daily. News, shopping, or even product comparison: before arriving on desktop, many Internet users prefer this device:
- more than 92% of users access the internet from their mobile phone;
- in 2020, there were 1.5 million more e-buyers than in 2019 ;
- less than 50% of users return to a site they consider slow .
Who has never complained about a blank page or an untimely lag in the display? The contents are initially displayed, but are then shifted due to the loading and display of dynamic elements. These problems directly and indirectly affect the perception of the speed of your website. And even more than the frustration they generate, they can go as far as triggering a real “rage click” (clicking several times on a button without a response from the browser).
Result: the user experience is degraded and bounce rates are increasing, thus following the inverse curve of your conversion rates.
3. Reduced load times = reduced bounce rate
We were just talking about it before: web performance can help you reduce the bounce rate on your pages. With faster pages, the UX is much smoother. Your users can browse pages without friction, or even make more purchases than expected. And this, in good (or less good) browsing conditions. Yes, if mobile usage is very widespread, not all of your users have the latest iPhone, and some may find themselves in places where there is no 4G…
So, even before these connection and device issues, if your pages take a long time to load, the chances of keeping your users are very (very) slim. This visit will have cost you more than it brought you. Amazon has done the math : 1 second of extra loading time could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year!
Finally, the shopping cart abandonment rate is higher on mobile phones (97%) than on computers (70%). And according to a study, one of the reasons that pushes users to leave these pages is the loading speed. Indeed, waiting times that are too long can demotivate them and push them to leave the page. But they can also impact their trust in your site , especially at the time of payment. Even if your site is reliable, if it is slow, users may question its security and leave.
4. Optimize your loading speed = better SEO
Since 2021, Google has made UX an SEO signal. In addition to other criteria related to web performance, Core Web Vitals are integrated into SEO analysis. The loading speed of your pages can influence the SEO of your web content.
Core Web Vitals, the metrics to evaluate the UX of your web pages
These three metrics are key indicators that you should monitor to assess the loading speed of your pages . Present on analysis tools such as PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse , they evaluate the UX offered on your site in terms of loading speed. In particular, they allow you to measure:
- the display speed of larger elements, through the LCP ;
- the interactivity of your site with the FID , replaced by the INP in March 2024;
- visual stability, thanks to CLS .
It is by optimizing these metrics that you avoid:
- unstable display with impromptu popups, for example;
- a page that remains blank for too long ;
- degraded interactivity , such as when forms are unusable: your users try to fill them out, in vain…
Web performance as an SEO tie-breaker
Loading speed can be a criterion to decide between pages on competitive queries: “travel” or “insurance”, for example! As we mentioned above, Core Web Vitals can also be used by Google robots to rank your pages and decide between the best ones.
Here, the fourth result comes in second place thanks to better loading times than the other 2. Thus, loading speed helps you stand out in search results in a competitive market .
Crawl budget or how to have more indexed pages, with optimized loading times
Optimizing your web performance means optimizing your crawl budget: the faster your pages are displayed, the more Google robots will be able to crawl them. To do this, these robots rely in particular on a metric: the Time To First Byte , which must be as low as possible. And if they are better optimized than those of your competitors, then you will be able to overtake them!
Finally, what could be better than a fast site that allows you to meet your objectives?
- business,
- techniques,
- but also to your concerns about the environment?
Yes, a high-performance site is a less polluting site!
5. Reduce your carbon footprint thanks to web performance
A slow website is generally a site that requires a lot of resources to load: the server response time may be higher, which consumes energy. In addition, images, the graphic charter, your JavaScript and CSS files, your typography, etc.: all these elements that contribute to the aesthetics or interactivity of your site can also increase the carbon impact of your site (in addition to penalizing your performance).
Thus, a more efficient site is based on resources that are optimized:
- compressed images ;
- minified JavaScript or CSS files;
- a clean code…
Web performance is therefore also a way to reduce your carbon footprint while guaranteeing an excellent UX for your users .
Web performance, a complex and difficult subject to maintain?
At Fasterize, we see it clearly, web performance is a subject that many companies are tackling. But web performance often faces obstacles:
- awareness raising and training of different teams (tech, business), which do not all have the same objectives or intentions;
- frequent requests from IT teams for uninteresting issues;
- the need to have experts on the subject internally ;
- the difficulty of continuing to apply webperf optimizations over the long term and taking it into account in the life of the site;
- regular needs for updates , modifications in your code…
To overcome these obstacles sustainably, a solution is available to you: the automation of good webperf practices . This is the guarantee to benefit from all the advantages of a truly fast site . By trusting the Fasterize teams, you will benefit from recognized expertise. The perfect opportunity to save time and your resources, but also to improve your skills internally!
If this article has piqued your curiosity and you want to explore the subject further, don’t miss our ebook on the fundamentals of webperf to benefit from and better understand the issues!
