Is your website fast enough? This tool will tell you.
Following on from our IOS 10 article we thought we’d also mention the other important recent mobile news; Google has launched a tool to help you ensure that you are offering an impressive mobile experience to your visitors.
The tool, https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/, explains how mobile-friendly your website is, and gives suggestions on how to improve it where necessary.
Performance
One of the main areas the tool focuses on is speed and performance.
This is because Google knows that people, especially mobile users, don’t like to wait for a site to load.
People are in a hurry and need information immediately, are too lazy to wait for a laptop to boot up, or are on a limited data plan, and want to make the most of their data allowance.
Research shows that mobile users expect sites to load even quicker on a phone than on a desktop PC, and there are many studies that back this up.
Why Performance Matters
Here are some stats to help you understand why speed is important:
- 47% of consumers expect a website to open in 2 seconds or less
- 40% of visitors abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load
- 7% fewer conversions if site is just 1s slower
- A £100,000 a day ecommerce site would lose £2.5m in sales annually
- Google sees 8 million fewer searches if the site is just 0.4s slower
- Think of the lost revenue
- Amazon will lose over $1.6 billion in sales annually if the site slows down by just 1s
- Walmart sees a 1% increase in revenue for every 100ms saved
If people won’t wait a second longer for Google, Amazon or Walmart to load, they probably won’t wait for your website either.
Conclusion
Speed has always been important, but now we are more impatient, and more inclined to press the back button, your website needs to be as fast as possible.