You’ve taken the steps to make your brand’s site easy to navigate, easier to read and easier to find…but you’re still noticing poor conversion. What’s the cause? If the rest of your site is superb, your lagging load times could be turning potential customers away.
We’ve all gotten frustrated by slow sites, but when does it become a deterrent? Strangeloop dug into how our brains respond to site load times and found some interesting results.
It only takes a matter of seconds for a user to completely lose interest in your site and the product or service you’re selling. Even if your site falls just within the span of a 10-second load time, you’re already fighting an uphill battle dealing with a likely angry or annoyed customer. A whopping 78% of users say they have felt stress or anger while using a slow website, stress and anger that, no doubt, probably affected their decision to continue visiting or purchasing from your site. (4% of users have even thrown their phone out of frustration while using a slow mobile site.)
Even if the end is in sight and you’ve gotten a visitor to commit to making a purchase, the longer it takes the transaction to complete, the more anxious the customer feels. In fact, 44% of online consumers feel anxiety during a slow online transaction.
The key takeaway from this research is that 57% of online consumers will abandon a slow page after 3 seconds. If your landing page lags, it’s time to retool.
Looking to boost conversion in other ways? Check out our Landing Page Guide for 2013 for more tips and tricks to land customers.
