Faster Site = Higher Conversion Rate

We live in an instant and impatient world. Entertainment, information, retail - no industry is safe from the growing impatience of the modern consumer. Customer demands for convenience and speed are why you can pre-order your coffee at Starbucks, use self check-out at the grocery store, pay extra for overnight delivery, and use a fastpass at Disneyland. This impatience is also the reason why half of your site’s visitors may not be making it to your landing page.

53% of all mobile site visits leave a page that doesn’t load in 3 seconds. If your website is not fast, you are losing sales - shoppers will abandon their cart, switch to a competitor, and likely will not return.

53% of all mobile site visits leave a page that doesn’t load in 3 seconds.

How fast your site loads is extremely important:

• In 2013 alone, 66% of mobile shoppers abandoned an ecommerce shopping cart because it was either loading too slowly or never came up at all - a rate that is most likely higher now..
• If made to wait, 14% of online shoppers will move on to a competitor’s site.
• After a poor site experience, 79% of online shoppers state they are less likely to support a site again.

When it comes to online speed - seconds are everything.

Websites that take 5 seconds to load experience 38% fewer conversions versus their faster competitors.

Websites that can load within 3 seconds experience 22% fewer conversions when compared to sites that load in one.

A mere one second delay in mobile page load time leads to a 7% loss in conversion.

What kind of impact would a 7% increase in conversion have on your ecom sales?

On the surface, these stats may seem unbelievable or extreme, but they are in fact true and a reflection of how impatient we’ve become as a society. Think about how many accidents are caused by drivers trying to shave seconds off of their commute. Think about how short the modern consumer’s attention span is. During the Emetry Wine Industry Data Summit last week, Ken Burbary, Chief Strategy Officer at Emetry, outlined how the average human’s attention span has dropped from 12 to 8 seconds from 2000 to 2013, and it’s probably even lower today. Seconds matter! If I visit your site and it takes me 5 to 10 seconds to change pages or navigate around, it’s very likely I will:

1. Get distracted while waiting and leave (check my email, facebook, the text I just got),
2. Leave the page and delude myself into believing I’ll come back later, or
3. Check out the website of another winery I visited while on my vacation in Napa.

Wineries that recognize and capitalize on their consumer’s impatience have a lot to gain. On average - ecommerce websites that can cut 3 seconds off their load time see an increase in overall revenue from 7-12%!

What You Can Do:

To see how your site ranks in terms of speed, and how you can improve - I suggest trying the Lighthouse audit tool built into Google Chrome. This audit will outline what kind of experience consumers are having while shopping on your website, and will offer tips on how to increase your speed.

To use the tool:

1. Go to your website,
2. Right click anywhere on the screen,
3. Select Inspect,
4. Select Audits (you may have to select “>>” next to Memory to navigate to Audits),
5. Select Mobile (this is where the majority of visits come from),
6. Make sure the performance box is checked, and
7. Run the audit.
8. (Optional) Read the stats provided on the Lighthouse progress bar.

After your audit - Google will recommend specific “opportunities” for speeding up your site. Have your designer execute on these opportunities and you’ll be on your way to a higher conversion rate.

While our performance is in the green it looks like we have some work to do ourselves.

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