Have you ever thought about how long your customers are ready to wait for the page to load before they leave? Approximately 47% of online customers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less, while 64% of mobile users expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds.

If your website takes longer than a few seconds to load, your conversion rates, revenue, and SEO ratings will all suffer. This is why it’s so important to optimize web speed. Load time has a direct influence on web performance, and even a slight improvement in web speed can get you more conversions and sales.

The team at Skilled.co have created a comprehensive infographic that details the impact that speed can have on a website. It looks at data compiled from a range of reliable sources and case studies drive home the importance of web speed and page load time. Do you have an online business? Are you looking to develop a website? Then this article and infographic are for you.

How Speed Affects Web Performance:

As an online business owner, your goal is to attract as many visitors as possible and get most of them to stick around long enough to make a purchase. But that’s not all: you also want the first-time visitors to keep coming back to your website and create a pool of loyal customers. The way to do this, besides offering quality service, is to optimize your page load time.

No customer will hurry back to your site if they were unsatisfied with the website’s performance the first time around. According to customer reports, 79% of those who were unhappy with a page load time said they were less likely to buy from that same site again.

If your website is just 1 second slower than what your customers deem to be the optimum load time, your conversion rate will drop by 7% and you can lose up to 11% in page views.

This is where web speed optimization comes into play. Improving load time by 1 second can have a significant impact on your conversions and revenue. For instance, if your website makes $100,000 a day, speeding up your website by 1 second can bring you an additional $7,000 a day.

Web Speed Optimization Case Studies:

Several case studies on some of the most successful companies out there show that improving web speed leads to increased conversion rates, higher levels of customer satisfaction, more page views and improved SEO rankings, and reduced bounce rates:

• A case study for Bing showed that a 2 second delay in load time would cost Bing 4.3% in revenue per visitor, 3.75% reduction in clicks, and 1.8% drop off in queries.

• According to a case study on SmartFurniture, speeding up the site would lead the online retailer to increase its organic traffic by 20%, page views by 12%, and improve their search engine rankings by an average of two positions.

• Microsoft would suffer a 0.21% reduction in query volume if their page load time slowed down by just 400 milliseconds.

• Google too would have to pay the price of slower load time: increasing latency by 100ms and 400ms would cause 0.2% and 0.6% reduction in daily searches.

For more case studies on how optimizing page load time leads to better web performance, take a look at this comprehensive infographic from Skilled.co