Does Page Speed Affect Conversions?

Imagine you’re visiting a new website for the first time. It’s ranked highly on Google, and it looks like exactly what you’re after – but it all starts to fall apart once you’re on the site. The pages are slow to load and unresponsive, which makes it tiresome to use.

Growing impatient, you close the tab and move on to the next site, which loads rapidly, showing you the information you were looking for in a matter of seconds. Your questions answered and concerns allayed, you’re ready to buy or fill in a contact form. The website has done its job: you’ve converted.

In this scenario, the first website failed to deliver a conversion simply because it was too sluggish. And we’re willing to bet that something similar has happened to you before. Page speed clearly impacts conversion rates, then, but by how much? Let’s look at some statistics.

The numbers don’t lie

Utah-based digital marketing agency Portent analysed conversion data from 10 websites, scrutinising over 26,000 landing pages. They found the following:

• Once load times breach the four-second mark, conversion rates begin to fall more sharply
• Conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% for each additional second of loading time (up to five seconds)
• After the five-second mark, conversion rates fall by an average of 2.11% with each passing second (up to nine seconds)

Unbounce took a different approach, surveying hundreds of consumers and marketers to get their views on page speed. They found that:

• Almost 70% of consumers say that page speed affects their willingness to buy from an online store
• Half of those surveyed would be happy to wave goodbye to animations and video in return for faster load times

Page speed is now more important than ever following the introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals search ranking factor.

How to check your site’s performance

Now you know just how important page speed is where conversion rates are concerned, why not check how fast your site is? All you have to do is input your URL into Google’s pagespeed insights tool and wait for the results – it’ll even make suggestions to help you improve your site’s responsiveness.