How long will customers wait for your site to load? Not long, says our tech expert
Is your mobile site losing you sales?
Statista found only 26 per cent of us are happy to stay on a website if it takes longer than five seconds to load.
With that in mind, previous Google research has found that on a mobile phone, this can take a whopping 22 seconds to load fully!
Why is speed important?
Site speed can hit small businesses the hardest and fast load times are vital so you can avoid the following:
- Losing conversions at checkout
- The competition stealing your potential sales
- A damaged reputation
Building a website optimised for speed
Kissmetrics found that you could experience a 7 per cent drop in conversions for a one second delay in website load time. If you make £500 a day from mobile visitors, this extra second could cost you more than £12,000 in sales each year.
Optimising for mobile site speed can:
- Enhance visitors’ UX on your site
- Increase conversion rates on mobile
- Bring in a higher sales revenue
Does your website perform well on mobile?
Google has launched a new conversion metric – Relative Mobile Conversion Rate (Rel mCvR). First mentioned back in 2018 and it’s finally here for us to utilise!
It’s going to help track mobile conversion rates far more efficiently, giving a ratio of desktop versus mobile conversion rates, so we know if our site performs on mobile as it should.
Google have set the bar for us all. Lina Hansson, a Google Conversion Specialist, recommends you’re at 50 per cent Rel mCvR now, and then aim for 70 per cent.
It’s worth noting here that you’re unlikely to ever reach a parity on conversion rate across these devices because mobile users are more likely to be in the research rather than buying stage. However, aiming for Google’s standards is a great place to start and improving your mobile site speed is a key player in getting there.
Your overall site conversion rate can be influenced by a number of factors – external ones such as seasonality, and by site performance, usability and site speed.
While you can’t always influence the external factors, you can make vital mobile site improvements. That’s what’s so great about Rel mCvR – external factors minimally impact this metric, as they tend to affect both devices.
Now it’s much easier to quantify the effects of your mobile site improvement changes, without external factors potentially falsifying the results.
If you’re interested in optimising your mobile site for speed, get in touch with the Evoluted team.
Ash Young, Evoluted
