There are many things on your website that can affect conversion rates. It is a measure of how many visitors are converting into customers. Specifically, Page load time is an important factor that impacts your website’s conversion rate.
Though you have made your website highly functional, slow load times can make the entire experience go bad. And this results in many undesirable consequences. People usually tend to spend just 8 seconds waiting for your website to load. If your website fails in loads in the first 3-5 seconds, you have already failed. The website that not responsive and light, loses its conversion then and there.
Your site speed is the very first CRO technique that you have to implement. First impression matters in the conversion rate optimization also. Not only your landing appearances but the speed with which it appears, matters. The articles explain, what you are missing with website load speed.
Here are the slow load speed factors that can impact your conversion rate:
The bounce rate of a website is the percentage of people coming to the website is “bouncing back” without getting what they need. The bounce rate factor completely depends on the type of website you have. With the website that takes more than a minute to load, you are inviting the bounces of traffic.
Consider a dictionary site - if a person came to your page for a particular meaning, then they may jump back if they find the answer they need. For these kinds of pages, 80% of the bounce rate would be quite acceptable. However, if you have an eCommerce website, it might get you in great trouble.
If the home page of your eCommerce site loads well but the product page loads slow, visitors may quit the site. You can experience similar things for a blog site too. If visitors find it loading slow, they are more likely to press that back button.
If your website takes 3 seconds to fully load, there is a probability of up to 32% that the user will abandon your site! Many studies show that a load time of fewer than 1.2 seconds is necessary for having low bounce rates.
Cart abandonment is when a potential customer goes away without purchasing any product in the cart. Both cart and checkout abandonment are not good for your business. The reason behind abandonment must be tackled with several trials and A/B testing.
There are other prominent reasons for cart abandonment like high shipping fees, limited payment methods, loading time. If your user places the product on cart only to find that the checkout page takes forever to load, they just go away!
It has been observed that a website with slow performance can increase cart abandonment by 75%. Also, customer loyalty could drop by 50%. It has also been found that if your eCommerce site has a 65% cart abandonment rate, it's a 97.9% gap in the conversion.
Click here to know How Important is Good Site Architecture For CRO
You may already know that a session is a metric of visits but not visitors. If a user visits a website twice, there would be two sessions and only one visitor. So, we can always say that Number of sessions will always be greater than the number of visitors.
If the number of sessions is very nearer or lower to the number of visitors, then people are visiting your site fewer times. While there are many reasons for this, slow site speed is also a major cause. A report suggested that session lengths can be reduced by half with just a 2-second delay!
People who bounce back from your site/store or abandon the cart midway might not just keep it to themselves. They might leave a bad review, tell their friends how bad/annoying your site is.
You need to understand that word of mouth recommendations/warnings are a powerful way of getting, retaining, or losing customers. Because many people tend to base their purchasing decisions on others' opinions.
You cannot risk your website being given negative publicity. It can reduce the overall new traffic coming to your website and new conversions. Furthermore, a slow website will make the existing customer turn away which certainly decreases the overall conversion rate.
Search engines interpret bad reviews, low session length, high bounce rates in a bad way. Hence, slow load speeds can lead to a serious decrease in the SEO performance of your website.
Bad reviews from your customers have a profound impact on customers’ opinions. This gauges your site's popularity and trustworthiness from online reviews.
A website that has good reviews would surely be considered legitimate and useful by Google which ranks it up in the search results. Otherwise, it may go down which causes less traffic to appear to your site. This, in turn, decreases the number of people who are ready to be customers ultimately decreasing your conversions.
As important Search Engine Optimization is for getting good traffic to your website is, Conversion Rate Optimization is equally important. It would not be the traffic but you require conversions. By understanding what impacts the conversions, you can understand where you need to work on. So that you may have better conversion rates.
One of the factors that have a considerable impact on the conversion rate is site loading speed. The main problem you face with a site that has a slow loading speed is that it will have a high bounce rate. It is acceptable in certain situations but bad in general.
Other effects of slow loading speed are: increase in card abandonment of e-commerce websites, a decrease in SEO performance, and an overall increase in your CRO investment.