Slow websites lose customers: what the research says

You already know this from your own phone. You tap a link, the page sits blank, and a few seconds later you press back and try the next result. Your customers do exactly the same thing on your website.

What the research says

Google's mobile page speed study is one of the most quoted pieces of research on this. Its headline finding: 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. The same study found that as load time goes from one second to seven seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 113%.

That research is from 2017 and was measured on mobile sites, so the exact percentages will have moved since. The direction hasn't: the longer people wait, the more of them leave.

Speed is also about sales

A later study by Deloitte Digital, commissioned by Google, looked at more than 30 million user sessions across 37 retail, travel and luxury brands. Its finding is striking for how small the change is: a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed increased conversion rates by 8.4% for retail sites and 10.1% for travel sites.

Those were large brands with online shops, so don't expect the same numbers for a local business site. The lesson still applies: visitors respond to speed in ways they never notice themselves, and a faster site turns more of them into enquiries, bookings and sales.

What counts as “fast”?

Google measures real-world experience with three Core Web Vitals. For a page to count as good, at least 75% of visits should meet these targets:

• Loading: the main content appears within 2.5 seconds.
• Responsiveness: the page reacts to a tap or click within 200 milliseconds.
• Visual stability: things don't jump around while the page loads.

Why most small business sites are slow

• Huge images. A single uncompressed photo can be bigger than the rest of the page combined.
• Too many plugins and scripts. Each one adds weight and work for the visitor's phone.
• Pages built on every visit. Many platforms assemble each page from a database every time someone arrives.
• Cheap, crowded hosting. Your site shares a busy server with hundreds of others.

What you can do this week

1. Test it the way customers do. Open your site on your phone using mobile data, not your office Wi-Fi.
2. Run a free test. Google's PageSpeed Insights scores any page and lists what is slowing it down.
3. Fix the photos first. Resize them to the size they're shown, and use a modern format like WebP.
4. Remove what you don't use. Old plugins, extra fonts and tracking scripts nobody reads.
5. Ask your provider what they do about speed. If the answer is vague, that's your answer.

How we handle it at HUGways

Speed is built in, not bolted on. Your pages are prepared in advance rather than assembled on every visit, and every image is resized and converted to WebP automatically. We also test your site on Google's PageSpeed Insights, the Mozilla Observatory and an SSL test, fix what they flag, and send you the results so you can see the proof for yourself.

Visitors don't tell you your site is slow. They just leave.

Want to know how your site measures up? Book a free demo and we'll look at it together.

References

• Daniel An, Google. Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed (Think with Google, republished on the AMP Blog), 28 February 2017.
• Deloitte Digital and Google. Milliseconds make millions (web.dev case study).
• Google. Web Vitals (web.dev): Core Web Vitals and their “good” thresholds.
• Google. PageSpeed Insights: free page speed test.