How Does Website Performance Affect Conversion Rate?
Website performance directly impacts conversion rates, often making the difference between profit and loss. Back in 2013, Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, experienced a 30-minute downtime episode that resulted in an estimated loss of $66,240 every minute. It would have been the worst nightmare as speculations suggested that Amazon could lose up to $1.6 billion in sales due to such a delay.
Today when tech-savviness has permeated amongst most internet users, people loathe websites that take a long time to load. Speed directly impacts the mood of users as every website is expected to be a fast-loading website.
We will be understanding how website performance affects conversion rates, starting with defining what website performance and conversion rate mean, and then exploring their interconnectedness through various performance elements and best practices for improvement.
What is Website Performance?
Website performance refers to how efficiently a website functions and delivers content to its users. Technically, it measures how much time it takes for all components on the website to load and become interactive for users, or in general, how swiftly the website works. Several factors impact site performance, such as optimizing images by compressing them, minimizing HTTP requests by combining files, enabling browser caching to store files locally, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to remove unnecessary elements, enabling compression to reduce file sizes, implementing asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript to avoid render-blocking, and optimizing web fonts to reduce load times. Each of these contributes to the overall performance, significantly influencing user engagement and conversion rates, which ultimately determines the success of your website.
What is Conversion Rate in a Website?
Website conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on a website. So, if a website has 1,000 visitors in a month and 100 of them make a purchase, the conversion rate for that month would be 10%. The action that triggers conversion will vary from website to website depending on the nature of the business and the goals you set for conversion.
When a goal is completed, that is considered a conversion on a website. Typical goals for conversion include completing a purchase, filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a resource such as whitepaper. Ideally, to be considered good, an average conversion rate is almost around 2% to 5%.
Understanding Different Elements of Website Performance
The performance of a website depends on page load speed, mobile responsiveness, UIUX, server performance and website security that collectively determine how well it is going to meet the needs of users.
1. Page Load Speed
One of the most critical aspects of website performance is page load speed, which refers to how much time a website takes to load. It is proven that site speed affects your conversion in a significant way. How much time it takes for your website to load depends on various factors like server response times, file size and how well the files have been compressed, number of HTTP requests, cache, use of CDN how well the images have been optimized, the redirects to the website, fonts, JavaScript async and deferred loading, third party scripts, and loading of non-critical resources.
By optimizing these elements, site speed can be enhanced remarkably. For instance, using a content delivery network (CDN) distributes content across multiple servers and reduces load times. Next browser caching stores frequently used files on devices of users which results in improvement in website page load times on return visits. A fast website is always favored and no user prefers to stay on a slow website for long. A site that loads in 1 second will have an edge over a site that loads in 5 seconds.
2. Mobile Responsiveness
With 75% of users preferring to access websites via mobile devices, mobile responsiveness is one of those critical performance factors that impact conversion rates. A website must function smoothly across various screen sizes and devices to retain and convert mobile visitors; it should support fast mobile page loads, as site speed is crucial even in this case. For that it must make use of viewport meta tag, touch-friendly elements and avoid heavy plugins.
Mobile-responsive web design uses flexible grids and layouts that adapt to different screen sizes. Once the design is ready it must be tested against various parameters and on various devices to ascertain that it is a fully mobile responsive website.
3. Website Uptime and Reliability
Uptime and reliability of a website directly impact user’s trust in your platform. Frequent downtime damages the business’s reputation and indicates that you are likely to lose opportunities. On the contrary, if a business is able to maintain a good uptime then it positions its website as reliable to its users.
In general, businesses should aim for the highest possible uptime – ideally 99.99%, which means your website is available to its users everytime. Regularly monitoring the website using tools like Pingdom or UptimeRobot is one great way to continuously check website availability. Moreover, schedule maintenance during off-peak hours to minimize disruptions, and automate failover systems switch to backup servers if the primary server goes down.
4. User Experience (UX) and Interface Design
UIUX is a much talked about thing surrounding websites these days. A successful website owes a lot to the design of its interface. Ultimately, user experience depends on that. Though used mostly in combination and considered a single term, UI and UX are two separate components of a website design. The former deals with user interface (UI) and the latter with user experience (UX) which is the result of the former. So, a well-designed UI will lead to great user experience.
User interface directly affects conversion, with a well-crafted UI doubling the conversion; to add, improvements in user experience strategy improves the conversion rate by 400%. So, if you don’t want users to abandon the website, you must have a strong UIUX strategy. Principles of effective UX design include clear navigation, consistent design elements, responsive feedback, and accessibility. While designing UI, it is important to take feedback from users to build a design that will correspond with their requirements.
5. Server Performance
Server has to play an important role in the overall conversion process, as it decides the amount of time it takes for a website to appear for its users. Users always desire content to load quickly. Ideally a website hosted on a good server takes an average of 3 seconds to load. So, speed improvement means server performance improvement. There are various metrics such as request per second, response time, peak response time, CPU usage, site load average, and error rates that must be monitored to maintain server performance.
Other key steps for optimizing server performance revolve around choosing the right hosting plan, optimizing server configuration, and using server-side caching. The hosting plan should match the site’s traffic and resource needs. As a one-stop solution, make use of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to keep a track of these metrics through visualizations and alerts.
6. Website Security
Website Security measures are vital for protecting a website and its users from cyber threats. Some form of cybercrime occurs every 39 seconds. Multiple incidents of security infringements will lead to poor portrayal of the website, which will dissuade the audience from exploring it. Consequently the conversion rate will fall and if not addressed it will fall drastically.
On the other hand, a secure website builds trust and reduces the risk of data breaches, which will improve user confidence and thus conversion rates. Key website security practices that must be followed to maintain security include implementing SSL certificates, conducting regular security audits, using firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and educating users.
Impact of Website Performance on Conversion Rate
Let’s understand how website performance shows its effect on conversion rates by looking at the impact it leaves across the bounce rate, seo & organic traffic and trust & credibility.
1. Bounce Rates
High bounce rates indicate poor website performance. Even a delay of a second increases the bounce rate by over 100%. When visitors leave a website shortly after arriving, it means they did not find what they were looking for or encountered performance issues. Achieving lower bounce rates requires you to follow multiple steps which, over a period of time, leads to better conversion rates. Empathize with users to understand what they are looking for and come up with content that will make them have a good time on your website.
2. SEO and Organic Traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very significant factor impacting website performance. Multiple findings have shown how organic search contributes to more than half of the total traffic. In the B2B sector alone 64% traffic comes from organic channels.
Search engines like Google consider website speed and mobile responsiveness when ranking sites. A website in which all web pages have been optimized is more likely to appear higher in search results, driving more organic traffic and potential conversions. Psychologically, users tend to avoid sponsored ads on SERPs and rather first explore organic results. In this regard, building a meticulous SEO strategy holds the key as it boosts search engine rankings and leads to improvement in visibility and traffic.
3. Trust and Credibility
Why do most of us prefer to explore Amazon and other top eCommerce websites for online shopping, when there are thousands of online stores on the internet. Apart from offering a seamless collection of different items that has increased the likelihood of making anything available, these platforms have established a credible reputation by maintaining performance consistency. This is one simple reason why people trust them blindly.
When visitors feel confident that a site is professional and secure, they are more likely to complete desired actions, such as making a purchase or providing personal information. However, it takes a lot on the technical front to build this trust, and the successful platforms have been doing it perfectly to maintain their image.
To Wrap Up
As competition intensifies online, superior website performance can be a defining factor in standing out and conversion rate optimization becomes a key step in this process. Businesses that neglect the correlation between site’s performance and conversion rate will find themselves lagging behind, losing potential customers to faster, more efficient competitors.
Speed and performance are correlated, so Invest in optimization to improve the time to load to yield long-term benefits and boost the website’s credibility. Seek technical expertise from a leading website development service provider to build a winning plan to build a fast-loading website and exponentially increase your conversion rates.