Slow-loading sites are losing sales and conversions [Case study]
It’s no secret that a slow-loading website is bad for business. But just how bad?
Thanks to new data from case studies of major online brands, it’s getting a lot easier to quantify the negative effects of poor page speed.
Here are just a few alarming statistics:
- For every second that your website takes to load, conversions drop by 7 PERCENT or more.
- If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you could be losing nearly HALF of your visitors.
- 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with a site’s performance say they’re less likely to buy from the site again.
But what about the flip side of that coin? How can your results be improved by making your site faster?
To answer that question, let’s look at one case study of an e-commerce store that tried to slash its page load time.
How AutoAnything.com Boosted Sales by 12-13%
AutoAnything.com is an auto parts e-commerce store that is ranked #204 on the “Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide.” Their inventory includes more than 4.2 million SKUs.
The Problem
Like most website owners, developers at AutoAnything.com initially believed the site speed was fine. But upon closer inspection, they realized that the homepage was taking up to 9 seconds to load for some visitors. Ouch. So they decided to see what would happen if they reduced that load time.
The Approach
AutoAnything.com worked with engineers to divert half of its traffic to faster servers. This enabled them to cut load time in half – a massive improvement.
The Results
Slashing the site load time had a clear, measurable impact on sales:
- Visitor-to-sales conversion rates increased by 9%
- Average ticket size increased 11%
- Overall sales increased by 12-13%
For a large e-commerce store like AutoAnything.com, those improvements translate into a significant boost in annual revenue.
