Website speed, or website performance, is one crucial component of an amazing digital experience and it’s the first factor visitors notice.
Recent data reports that nearly half of users expect a website to load within 2-3 seconds. Anything longer than that will likely result in an abandoned visit (bounce). So, with ever-increasing competition (a new website is built every 3 seconds), you’re losing business if your site is too slow.
Whether you’re a digital marketer or a developer, website speed is an important part of providing a positive user experience.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what contributes to a slow website, how to find out how well your website performs and learn about a new set of composable services from Adobe focused on maximizing the performance of your digital properties.
3 Ways Your Slow Website Speed is Affecting Your Business
1. Poor user experience and higher bounce rates
As mentioned above, users have short attention spans and no patience for long page loading times. When consumers bounce because of a bad experience, data shows that nearly 9 out of 10 won’t return.
2. Lower conversion rates
Slow websites are frustrating and hinder engagement which ultimately leads to dissatisfaction with the brand and lost revenue. In fact, it’s estimated that slow websites cost retailers $2.6 billion in lost sales annually.
3. Negative impact on SEO rankings
Google uses site speed as a factor in its search ranking algorithms to improve user experiences. This means faster-loading websites are more likely to rank higher in search engine results than slower-loading websites. So, if you want your site to be discoverable it must perform well.
The ability to deliver high-impact digital experiences that are discoverable, engaging, and convert is what can give your brand a competitive advantage in a highly competitive market. So, what can you do?
Do You Know How Fast Your Website is Now?
A good starting point to address performance challenges is finding out how your site currently measures up. There are several tools to do this, but one popular tool is Google Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is a free tool that assesses the overall quality and user experience of any publicly available web page. There are several ways to get started, but the easiest way is to run Lighthouse from a web UI. You don’t have to install anything. Just navigate to PageSpeed Insights and simply paste the URL of the page you want to test and click analyze.
You’ll see a diagnostic report that provides ratings for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO for both mobile and desktop versions of your page.
A score below 90 is a poor user experience and anything below 50 means you’re failing.
Considering the average load time for Fortune 100 websites is nearly 40% longer than what’s considered a good experience, chances are your current Lighthouse score is low too. Once you have your baseline, what can you do to improve?
How Adobe is Delivering Super-Fast Experiences
Some of the world’s largest brands are turning to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites with Edge Delivery Services, a new set of composable services focused on maximizing the performance of your digital properties.
Along with extreme content velocity and rapid development capabilities, Edge Delivery Services and AEM provide a performance-first approach to delivering super-fast loading experiences.
Features include
- Faster load times with edge caching: Content is regionally available at the edge with a high cache ratio to reduce the time it takes for data to travel, significantly improving page load speeds and ensuring a smoother user experience
- Enhanced Reliability and Scalability: Built to handle high traffic volumes, Adobe’s edge infrastructure ensures consistent performance even during peak times or unexpected traffic spikes, maintaining optimal site speed and responsiveness
- Phased content rendering: Loading web pages in phases makes it easy to achieve high Google Lighthouse scores and improve user experience
- Automated testing: Continuously test every code change to ensure high performance
- Continual proactive monitoring: Maintain site performance and identify dips with recommendations to quickly resolve issues
Big Brands Are Already Gaining a Competitive Edge With Adobe
24 Hour Fitness, Hanes, PGA TOUR, Sunstar, Merative, Maidenform, and Volvo Trucks are all big brands that are already realizing the benefits of using the AEM Sites with Edge Delivery Services.
For example, Adobe stated that Volvo Trucks was able to boost its mobile performance score from 35 to 100 and increase its visibility score from 2.5% to 43%
Merative improved its web performance score by nearly 200%, from 34 to 100, and reduced its page load speed by 85%, from 10.9 to 1.6 seconds. This performance improvement combined with accelerated development workflows ultimately boosted engagement by 42% and conversion by 100%.
And Maidenform has created its fastest ecommerce website in use today — with page load speeds 400% faster than before.
Performance speed is only one factor in delivering high-impact experiences but it’s an important one and one that gives enterprises like the ones mentioned above a leg up on the competition.
Speed Impacts Growth
Don’t miss out on your opportunity to maximize your ability to turn visitors into customers. Fast, optimized experiences lead to more traffic, better engagement, and higher conversions.
Any way you slice it, website speed matters.
Check out our on-demand introduction to Edge Delivery Services. You’ll learn how to not only improve site performance but also streamline your content creation for faster, high-performance results.
