[Think Insights with Google MY Newsletter] Make Your Mobile Site Faster (Oct 31, 2014)

[Think-Insights-Google-MY]

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October 31, 2014

by Bonnie Wong, Industry Analyst

Make Your Mobile Site Faster

Fast is better than slow. This mantra is particularly true when it comes to mobile website experience. In this newsletter issue, we examine why page speed matters and what resource is available to help you to deliver the best mobile experience to your users.

USERS WANT SPEED

“Why should marketers care about mobile website page speed?” you may ask.  Isn't mobile site page speed an obvious area that the IT folks should be looking at instead of the marketing folks? Well, you may want to think twice if you believe that building brand love starts from understanding what consumers want.

Based on the “What Users Want from Mobile Sites Today” research that Google conducted, mobile users declare, “Fast and easy, please”.  When asked how important speed is, 81% of respondents say that mobile sites MUST load quickly.

How fast is enough? Consider this: an experiment that Google ran shows that if search results are slowed by even a fraction of a second, people search less – a 400 milliseconds delay leads to a 0.44% drop in search volume. Instead of asking what the ideal site speed is, perhaps we should make reducing site latency a continuous goal.

PAGE SHOULD LOAD IN 3 SECONDS OR LESS

If you really need a page speed benchmark, you might want to consider aiming for 3 seconds or less. According to Radware’s State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance Report (Spring 2014), the majority of online shoppers will abandon a page after waiting 3 seconds for it to load.

PAGE SPEED CORRELATES TO BUSINESS METRICS

All this speed makes a difference, even if it is by 1 second faster. Here are some examples: For every 1 second of improvement on its site speed, Walmart experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions; for every 100 milliseconds of improvement on its site speed, Walmart grew incremental revenue by up to 1% Shopzilla dropped site latency from 7 seconds to 2. As a result, revenue went up 7-12% and page views jumped 25% Edmunds, a leading car review destination, reduced its insideline.com site’s load times from 9 seconds to 1.4 seconds. This helped to increase ad revenue by 3% and page views-per-session by 17%

The rationale is straightforward – when you speed up service, people become more engaged; and when people become more engaged, they click and buy more.

GOOGLE PAGESPEED INSIGHTS: MAKE THE WEB FASTER

If you are convinced to make page speed the priority of your website or just curious how your site is doing in this area, you can consider using Google PageSpeed Insights. It is a free open source web page analysis service for a quick desktop and mobile site page speed assessment.

If you do not have a site yet but are thinking of building a site, check out the “PageSpeed Rules” and “Usability Rules”:

Together, let’s make the web faster, make your website visitors happier and your business grow stronger.

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