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Load times can make or break your website. If your homepage takes too long to load, visitors are much more likely to exit the page and miss out on your fantastic content – a key reason why you shouldn’t overlook load times when building a website.
In short, website speed is super important, so I’ve put together this guide that will help explain why, highlighting 23 key statistics demonstrating the importance of speedy websites along the way. I’ll also identify the usual factors that contribute to slow sites, and share some tips on how you can speed up your own website.
What Factors Affect Website Load Time?
Some variables, like a user’s internet connection, are out of your control as a website owner. But the majority of issues affecting load time are factors that you can fix from your end.
1. Web Hosting
A web hosting company provides the server that your website will be hosted on, and you can choose between different types of servers. Shared, VPS, and dedicated servers are the most common options.
2. Web Hosting and Uptime
Different hosting companies have different uptime guarantees, which represent the amount of time the web server is available with no issues. And downtime is a real web hosting problem to tackle when deciding on your provider. You’ll want to choose a provider with a guarantee of at least 99.90% uptime. Tenths of a percentage may seem trivial, but the difference between 99.90% uptime and 99.95% uptime comes out to 4 hours and 23 minutes less downtime per year.
3. Web Hosting and Server Types
Once you have your hosting company picked out, you’ll need to choose the right plan. Shared servers are the cheapest option, but your website will then have to “share” resources with other sites on the same server. This is fine for small-to-medium-sized sites, but larger websites will have a difficult time maintaining satisfactory speed.
VPS and dedicated servers are the more advanced options, and massive companies and ecommerce retailers actually need multiple dedicated servers to ensure that their websites run as quickly as possible.
VPS and dedicated servers offer more resources, including bandwidth: the amount of data that your website can transfer to your visitors in a certain amount of time. If your website has high traffic volume, then you’ll need more bandwidth to accommodate it.
It’s possible for websites to start on a shared server, and then run out of storage space for their growing number of files, or start receiving more traffic volume than the shared server can accommodate. When that happens, you can easily upgrade from a shared to a VPS or dedicated server. Matt Tomkin of Tao Digital Marketing calls server upgrades the “easiest, quickest, and normally the most cost-effective way to reduce load time.”
4. Images, Videos, and Files
The larger your file sizes are, and the more files you have on a page, the longer it will take for the page to load – which means it’s important to optimize your images as much as you can.
A surprising number of sites aren’t doing this. Bourlet shared his experience with us:
“The amount of times I find full size images that haven’t been compressed or sized properly on a website is incredible. Even big brands often make this mistake, especially if they have a huge amount of pages and multiple people uploading imagery. It is important to train a team about compressing images and the importance of getting the right size uploaded. This is normally the best quick win for instant results.”
When optimizing images, I suggest seeing if you’re using the correct file size (JPGs are great for general photos, but you’ll want to use PNG if you need to showcase clearer details), or compressing your images to reduce the file size overall.
5. Plugins
WordPress plugins are great for adding advanced functionality to a website. However, it pays to be selective about the number of plugins you use, because too many at once will overwhelm your server. It may be easier than you think to part with a few plugins, as Tom has seen firsthand:
“Each plugin you have in place might add some time to the page load, but how many do you really need? Often when I go onto WordPress websites and list all the plugins, the website managers can’t explain what half of them are doing, or whether they’ve been set up right. Cut back to the basics and you should see a heavy improvement.”
Differences Between Mobile & Desktop Load Times
The speed of your website’s mobile and desktop view will vary. In fact, one study, that analyzed over 4 billion web visits, showed that the average time it takes to load a webpage is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile.
Though both devices are important, I recommend putting some extra work into optimizing your website’s mobile view since it’s the preferred method of browsing for most users. This is supported by a study that compiled info from the 100 most visited sites in the US, concluding that mobile devices lead to more unique website visitors than desktop devices.
How Does Mobile Browsing Differ From Desktop Browsing?
According to key data on mobile and desktop usage, here are the main browsing differences to take note of:
| Desktop Browsing | Mobile Browsing |
|---|---|
| Desktops have superior performance, so they’re better for loading up and viewing videos or content-heavy blog sites. | Social media platforms account for 25% of digital media consumption, most of which is on mobile devices. |
| Users are more likely to browse on a desktop for work purposes, especially if they have a highly digital role. | Mobile load speeds are typically slower on 4G and 5G networks in comparison to home Wi-Fi connections. |
What Are the Most Common Problems On Mobile?
Despite the importance of speedy load times on mobile devices, it’s still a common experience for people to come across snail-paced speeds when they browse. In fact, a whopping 73% of mobile users say that they’ve encountered a website that loaded too slowly.
So, what can be done about these load time issues? Well, some site owners turn to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). AMP is a project rolled out by Google and Twitter, and it’s basically a stripped-down version of HTML coding that allows mobile pages to load much faster.
AMP pages are meant to be “so fast they appear to load instantly,” which could help manage those pesky customer expectations I talked about earlier. That said, 32% of marketers have shied away from AMP because they don’t have the developer capacity to implement it.
How Web Speed Impacts Business
Website speed can impact everything from sales to search engine performance, meaning ecommerce sites will literally pay the price for delays. If you’re running an ecommerce site that makes $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could cost you $2.5 million per year in lost sales.
How Web Speed Impacts Sales
Any slow website load times, ecommerce or otherwise, will see an increase in bounce rate and a decrease in time on site. For instance, if a website takes 5.7%+ seconds to load, conversion rates can drop below 0.6%.
If you’re trying to make sales online, then the revenue losses resulting from slow speeds will be pretty destructive. But check out how much improvement you can make by increasing site speed by just 0.1 seconds:
How Web Speed Impacts Customer Loyalty
Speed also impacts how your business will fare against the competition. Almost half of all customers (46%) won’t revisit a website again if they’ve encountered slow loading speeds in the past, meaning that they’re more likely to head to a competitor’s website instead!
How Web Speed Impacts SEO
Content and relevance still reign supreme if you want to rise up the SERPs, but website load time is also a confirmed ranking signal by Google (known as Core Web Vitals), so it’s important to speed up your pages for a better shot at SEO success.
But why is site speed a ranking signal?
Because to Google, the user comes first – and as we’ve seen, slow load times mean dissatisfied users. Google’s research showed that the chance of a bounce increased by 32% when a page load time went from one to three seconds, and by 90% when the page load time went from one to five seconds. If a site takes up to 10 seconds to load, then the chance of a bounce increases to 123%!
Ecommerce Case Studies
Many businesses have seen a boost in their conversions after optimizing their Core Web Vitals. Vodaphone is a key example and were able to increase sales by 8% when they sped up their website during a round of A/B testing. During the tests, they were able to increase the website’s LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) score by 31%, meaning that the page’s main content content would now load more quickly.
Website Load Time Statistics: Summary
In short, speed is very important to a website’s success! Even the slightest improvements in page load time will help you slash bounce rates, boost conversion rates, and climb the search engine rankings.
But it’s not enough just to know how important website speed is. Now, you’re armed with actionable tips that will help you see results on your own pages, so start optimizing your website load times today.