Businesses today have switched to digital media to enhance their reach and maintain customer relations. The loading speed of the websites, applications, and mobile sites affects the metrics that matter to marketers like rates, average order values, and even page views.
Due to the rapid growth of the mobile-first culture, Deloitte and 55 conducted research, commissioned by Google, on the hour by hour mobile load times of 37 leading brands of America and Europe for a period of 30 days and published a report titled ‘Milliseconds make Millions’.
The final report submitted by them elaborately explains why the speed optimization of the mobile site of businesses is the need of the hour. The key findings of the report laid down the impact of improved site speed on various sectors.
An improvement in 0.1s mobile site speed led to a 8.4% increase in conversions with retail consumers, and an increase in average order value of 9.2%. With respect to conversions, a 10.1% increase was observed with travel consumers, and a slight increase in average order value of 1.9%. When it comes to bounce rate, the highest homepage bounce rate improvement of 6.5% was in the travel vertical while the lead generation informational pages bounce rate improved by 8.3%.
There are various other key improvements to engagement and conversion funnel progress based on a 0.1s site speed improvement. Let's have a look at them in detail:
The Growing Expectations Of Customers - Faster sites ensure more customers will reach checkout
Smartphones have transformed the whole shopping experience of customers. Today, customers are always on the move and have no patience for brands that take longer to load on their mobile.
Improving the speed of mobile sites can have a powerful impact on customers. In the report, it was found that the longer customers had to wait for a site to load, the less likely they were to make a purchase, or to revisit the site, or recommend it to a friend. While an improvement in mobile site speed leads to a positive change in number of page views, conversion rates, and average order value.
With the changing culture, the customers value a good user experience almost as much as the product or services they're buying, if not more. With the large-scale expansion of the market, customers now know that they have a variety of choices for the products they need. They, therefore, look for other factors to determine the value a brand adds to their lives.
The Need For Speed - Faster sites encourage people to stay longer and purchase more
The speed of a website has an incredible influence on its performance. Mobile site speed improvements have a direct correlation to improved funnel progression. Observe how the difference of merely 0.1 second affects the funnel progression rate of a site of different industries. The Bounce rates on product listing pages in retail and travel can improve by 5.7% and 5.4% respectively.
Retail
In a retail business, the loading speed of the product detail page should be focused on, rather than the home page. Most of the customers open the product detail page of several sites to find the best deal for it. If your site takes too long to load, they will automatically choose a competitor site that loads faster. Retail consumers are the most sensitive
to speed in the pre-checkout stages of their conversion journey.
Travel
Customers who need to buy travel services are less flexible due to their specific needs. These customers thus have higher patience and are less likely to abandon their purchase midway due to slow loading pages. However, the increased speed of your site will reduce the user's cognitive load and make them your loyal customers.
Luxury
Customers who buy luxury products pay a substantial amount and are often more comfortable with purchasing from an offline store. On the luxury brand sites, customers appreciate a better speed on the latter stages of the progression funnel. An improvement in 0.1 s of mobile speed can lead to 8% increase in page views per session for luxury sites.
Lead Generation
In lead generation, the sales usually take place at the brand's store offline. The online brand site is more effective for engaging customers and encouraging them towards conversion. The rate of customer engagement and form submission increases considerably with faster loading pages of the site.
Adapting To A Mobile-First Culture
You can adapt your brand to the changing needs of your mobile-using consumers by following these steps:
1. Analyzing the data of your site to understand how deeply speed impacts your business.
2. Designing a mobile-responsive framework for your site that focuses more on the needs of mobile users.
3. Introducing a page speed budget to ensure that your mobile site loads quickly and performs better on all platforms.
4. Choosing an appropriate analytics plan that emphasizes on funnels and conversion rates.
5. Establishing a performance centric-culture where everyone prioritizes speed.
Endnotes
A performance-centric brand site that uses a mobile-responsive framework and prioritizes speed has a high potential for meeting the rising expectations of the customers and also helping businesses achieve online success.
Access the report's results in full by downloading it here.