It’s Time to Start Analyzing Your Mobile Page Speeds
September 22, 2017
Shopping trends on mobile are on a sharp rise. Unfortunately, mobile site load speeds are not. Slow load times kill conversions with mobile shoppers. This is why it’s time to speed them up on your mobile website.
Wow, the new iPhone looks awesome! People are going to be lining up for this one, even though it isn’t cheap.
So when you spend big money on a phone, you’re going to expect the sites you visit to be fast and content to be both sharp and simple to navigate. After all, what’s the point of having this kind of phone if the page you’re browsing lags with outdated content?
There is no point, and consumers know it. Consider these stats from Google:
More than 30% of online purchases now happen online.
The average mobile retail site loaded in 6.9 seconds, but nearly half of consumers will leave if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
79% of shoppers say they’re unlikely to make another purchase when the website’s performance disappointed them the first time.
In other words, a great deal is riding on the load times and overall performance of your website on mobile. This also includes SEO rankings, as Google now lowers the ranking of sites with load time issues.
Complexity Kills
Google ran some robust tests to find out what caused people to convert and also what caused people to bounce on mobile retail pages.
The most important takeaway was that clunky, complex web pages loaded with extra design elements, images, and scripts did the most damage to conversions.
All that content slows page load times, causing bounce rates to skyrocket.
You know the situation. You click on a link, then wait for the page to load. But after 3, 5, 10 seconds, it still isn’t coming up. You get annoyed, say forget it and search elsewhere.
Excessive images are at the core of the problem. Google states that out of all the content overload, too many images was the biggest predictor of low conversions.
People enjoy simple pages that are easy to understand, intuitive to navigate, and fast to load. Too much content works against all these things.
The takeaway is pretty obvious. Less is more. Cull your content and only keep what’s necessary. Not only will pages load faster, but shoppers will prefer the design because it’s easier for them to complete their task.
Speed or Bounce
The biggest indicator of high bounce rates was also related to load times. Google noted this specifically by looking at how long it took for all elements of the page to load:
Beyond images, one of the big problems is Javascript coming from third party ads, analytics, and social widgets.
Some of this (like analytics) is standard, but avoid overloading this code because it prevents a browser from parsing HTML code that makes your main content visible.
To test the speed of your website on mobile, Google provides a website speed testing tool. This is a really useful way to see if your page could stand some improvement.
Online consumers have always valued speed. It’s a major expectation online.
Today’s mobile shoppers are even more impatient. They quickly figure a web page that won’t load won’t be worth their time – even if they were to wait for it.
But the data is clear. They won’t wait.
Speed sells with mobile shoppers. Check your web pages. Travel light.