Page load time and revenue - the anecdotal evidence
September 2019
A couple readers have been generous enough to share the results of their own site speed experiments. This 💩 will blow your mind.
Sarah Johnson said:
Fun fact: we just ran multiple month speed optimization testing from bottom of stack on up - from June to last week. NO IMPACT. Not from google, not from traffic volume, not from conversions, not from any comments/feedback.
David Janczyn said this:
I got paranoid after seeing https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/, and our mobile LPs loaded ~ 10sec
Understandable. At that /testmysite page, you enter a domain and get back an interactive report that tells you how many tens of thousands of additional dollars you’d be earning if you made your site faster.
So he and his team worked to speed up their landing pages. Then, just to see how big an effect speed has, they use Google Ads to split traffic between the old, slow page and the new, fast page.
Here are the results:
10sec vs 3sec load (on mobile). 0 impact.
😔
For what it’s worth, I don’t have full access to the details of these experiments. But both of these people have been CROing longer than I have, and they know their stuff. I trust their results.
So here’s what we’ve learned so far:
- Lots of websites make an unsupported claim that every tenth of a second is worth tons of money
- There’s an Akamai study that shows on average, sessions with faster site speed have higher conversion rates
- At least two real people have sped up their sites and seen no measurable impact
… so what can we do with that?
Tomorrow I’ll share the conclusion I’ve come to after a week’s worth of research and shocking revelations, and I’ll outline my dead simple plan for evaluating site speed improvement opportunities moving forward.
How about you? Do you still believe in the impact of page speed on conversions? Or is it all a vast conspiracy? Hit Reply and let me know.