Conversions: Faster mSites = More Revenue

by November 9, 2017

In her Faster mSites = More Revenue presentation at Google Conversions 2017 in Dublin Ireland, Eimear McCurry talked through the importance of mobile performance and a number of techniques to improve mobile loading times. Here's my notes from her talk:

  • The average time it takes for a US mobile retail Web site to load is 7 seconds but 46% of people say what they dislike the most about the Web on mobile is waiting for pages to load.
  • More than half of most site's new users are coming from mobile devices so to deliver a great first impression, we need to improve mobile performance.
  • Desktop conversion is about 2.5%. At 2.4 second loading times, conversion rates on mobile peek at about 2%, as load times increase it drops. Slowing down load time to 3.3 seconds results in the conversion rate dropping to 1.5%. At 4.2 seconds the conversion rate drops below 1%. By 6 seconds, the rate plateaus.
  • As load times go up, more users will abandon your site. Going from 1s to 3s increases the probability of bouncing by 32%. Going from 1s to 5s increases the probability by 90%.
  • Page rank (in search) and Ad rank (for ads) both use loading time as factor in ranking.
  • Your target for latency is one second but 1-2 seconds to load a mobile site is a good time. 3-6 seconds is average but try to improve it.

Improving Mobile Performance

  • AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) is a framework for developing mobile Web pages that optimizes for speed. It stores objects in the cache instead of needing to go back to the server to collect them.
  • Example: Greenweez improved mobile conversion rates 80% and increased mobile page speed 5x when moving to AMP.
  • Prioritize loading information in the portion of the webpage that is visible without scrolling.
  • Optimize your images: on average the majority of load size of web pages is images. Reduce the number of images on your site, make compression part of your workflow, use lazy loading, and avoid downloading images you are hiding or shrinking.
  • Enable GZIP to compress the size your the files you send. Minify your code to remove extraneous characters/file size. Refactor your code if you need to.
  • Reduce requests to your server to fewer than 50 because each request can be another round trip on the mobile network with a 600ms delay each time.
  • Reduce redirects: if you can get rid of them, do. In most cases redirects make it hard to hit load times under 3 seconds and aren't needed.