Site Speed and Usability

Posted by

Did you know usability tests have shown that the maximum number of seconds a user is willing to wait, on average, before abandoning a web page, is 8.6?

If that number surprises you, it should. The study took place in 1994.

The bar is exponentially higher now for people involved in website user experience design and development when it comes to load speed. Here’s a quick look at the state of affairs.

Slow speeds are a real usability challenge. According to software and monitoring experts at Gomez and Akamai, most users (up to 73%) have encountered a site that was too slow, crashed, froze or otherwise didn’t perform.

Your visitors’ expectations are high. A sizeable 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of people will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Slow load speed can be a costly challenge. These sources estimate that a 1-second delay can lead to a 7% drop in conversions, meaning that an e-commerce site doing $100k daily would experience a $2.5M loss in sales on an annual basis tied to 1 second in load speed.

If you’re curious about the impact of load speed on conversions, and want to learn about users’ expectations for mobile browsing vs. desktop browsing, KISSmetrics has built a stellar infographic on the topic.

Mozilla ran a study to test a similar concept: what happens if the development team combines files and rearranges the source to make the Firefox home page load 2.2 seconds faster? You guessed it. Conversions increased dramatically. Firefox saw a 15.4% lift in browser downloads.

If all of this weren’t compelling enough, you should also know that organic search results can be negatively affected by slow load times. If you run search engine advertising, you’re familiar with quality score—Google’s determination of how ‘relevant’ your ad is—and you know it impacts the per-click price of your ad. Landing page speed is part of the quality score determination, too.

You get the point. The need for speed is great, and there’s a lot at stake.

What can you do to improve load speed?

There are a lot of solutions for improving how quickly your site loads. Some are simple and quick to implement, and others are tougher to tackle. Here’s a strategy to start moving your site in the right direction.

Run speed tests. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. See what easy-to-implement suggestions it spits out and heed the recommendations.

Then run your site through the Pingdom speed tool. How many requests have to be done to load your site? Are there tracking scripts that might be outdated or aren’t needed anymore? Can you consolidate any of the other requests?

Knock out the low-hanging fruit changes. Some of the recommendations you might receive include things like:

● Minimize HTTP requests.
● Resize and optimize images.
● Optimize multimedia.
● Convert JavaScript behavior to CSS.
● Use server-side sniffing.
● Optimize JavaScript for execution speed and file size.
● Convert table layout to CSS layout.
● Replace inline style with CSS rules.
● Minimize initial display time.
● Load JavaScript wisely.
● Create a dedicated landing page for mobile.

Install plugins to simplify your process. Your content management system might have plugins available that’ll make your life easier. For example, here are a couple of popular WordPress plugins that help with load speed in various ways.

W3totalcache improves site performance by improving caching with respect to the browser, page, objects, database and more. To learn more about this, you can read up on configuring the W3 total cache plugin.

WP Smush.it—Especially if you’re a blogger, you probably use plenty of images, and images can take considerable time to load. This plugin reduces image file sizes and improves performance by compressing the files.

WP Optimize—This plugin allows you to clean up and optimize your database, especially if you’re a blogger with significant archives.

When in doubt, simplicity is key. Don’t be afraid to gut components that increase load time and A/B test simpler versions of the page against their predecessors. You may be surprised at the impact of a faster loading page, even if it suddenly has less of the stuff you once considered critical.

Toby Biddle is a seasoned website usability expert and CEO of Loop11, a tool for unmoderated online user testing.

Footnotes and sources

1 Nielsen, J. (1994). Usability engineering. London: Morgan Kaufmann.
2 You can learn about the Mozilla site speed case study here.