When a web visitor clicks a link that leads to your website, there is a symphony of digital activity behind the scenes. The number of handshakes happening between the layers of software across a multitude of machines in fractions of a second would truly astound any onlooker, if such a thing were viewable. We all effortlessly stand on the shoulders of giants when we participate in an internet browsing session, and you get a real appreciation for that fact when learning how web pages are assembled on the visitor’s machine. While we all undoubtably benefit, this complexity is not without its own set of costs for those of us looking to make a living on the web. Without a Maestro guiding the process, the performance can derail into a cacophonous mess.
The time it takes a website to fully display any given page is that page’s “load time.” This delay is due to the awesome process I describe above, a concert of software packages, multiple computers, and a labyrinth of networks. Some “pause” is unavoidable, even for the fastest website. It is our responsibility as “webrepenures” to ensure our websites minimize this delay as much as possible. Our visitor’s time is valuable, and extra seconds between each page add up over time.
I put together a demonstration on page load time. It both shows loading times in action and discusses why we are concerned with longer load times. Definitely check it out if you can, but the bottom line is this: Lengthy load times cost you both in the short and long terms. Short term when an impatient but conversion-ready visitor on a mobile device leaves your website for and goes to your speedier competitor’s site. Long term as major search engines like Google make a note each time something like this happens, deranking you and upranking your competitor’s site. Its not something a serious website owner can take lying down any more.
The crowning example of the importance of page load time comes from Amazon. Through careful study and analysis, they determined that a 1 second delay in their average load time costs them roughly $1.6 Billion in sales! I’m sure you can only imagine what kind of a fire this lit under their collective behind to shave off every tenth of a second they possibly could, using any and every tactic available in the book. Its not some abstract trend that only affects Amazon, everyone who maintains some kind of digital space on the web suffers from the impatience of web visitors.
I always encourage my clients to determine their own “cost of excessive loading.” In this exercise, I assist my clients in comparing the group of visitors who did something “valuable” on their website against those that did not. Using Google Analytics, this is often a quick 15 minute investigation (especially when GA has been configured properly.) The trend is always this: the “valuable” group will have a lower average load time when compared to the “no valuable action taken” group. Though there is certainly a degree of “noise” in that measurement, the trend is still worthwhile to note. With smaller gaps between those groups, page speed optimization may fall behind other digital priorities. Larger gaps between these two groups indicates a strong possibility for lost revenue and organic ranking, and that drafting a roadmap to better page speed performance is most likely in order.