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Fortune 500 Companies' Data On Page Speed vs CTR And Revenue (11)

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Woohoo! Free Info!

I love big companies' research departments. They spend $millions on expensive, foolproof research, and then they do a press release about it and I get to read it for free.

So, whilst we're conducting our own Stack That Money Page Speed Research Project, I've been refreshing my knowledge of the state of the art in research on page loading speed and its effect on clickthrough rates and, of course, revenue at the bottom line.

And I've gotta say - the results I'm seeing so far are kind of terrifying, at least for anyone who has ever said "oh, screw it, that's fast enough." - which I can assure you includes me.

But it also implies that page and server optimisation are a really underused area for us STMers to leap ahead of the competition - and make some serious $$$ from a few HTML tweaks.

The "Too Long, Didn't Read" version

Want to know the very short version here?

Faster pages make more money. Regardless of how fast they were to start with.

When I started researching this article, that wasn't the conclusion I was expecting to come to. In fact, I was expecting to come up with a rule of thumb like "If your page loads are below a second, don't worry about it."

However, the research - and there has been a lot of research - says that in 2013, that's just not true. Even if your page loading speed is .5 of a second, the big guys' research shows that if you make it faster, you'll make more money.

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• Google showed that a 500ms longer page load - from .4 seconds for page load to .9 seconds - reduced traffic by 20%.
• Amazon has done tests and shown noticable revenue drops from as little as a 100ms delay (Sadly the original presentation has Gone Away.)
• Akamai have showed that 47% of users EXPECT a page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• The Aberdeen Group have showed a 1-second delay for most e-commerce websites equals a 7% conversion drop.

Remember, too, that you can't control the user's page speed completely. Some elements - rendering time in the browser, 3g issues, slow ISPs - will always add time. So your servers and your pages really need to be as fast as they can be.

Is this research relevant to affiliate marketers?

Obviously, Amazon and Google have a rather different business model to the one we're using - at least, unless Jeff Bezos is lurking on STM somewhere. (Hi, Jeff!)

But the fact is that we're likely to be more affected by page load speeds than the big guys, not less. Most conventional forms of affiliate marketing are in one way or another interruption marketing. People aren't going out and Googling for our landing pages, they're seeing them pop up or clicking on an ad out of curiosity. At best, we've got people momentarily believing they might be able to GET SEX TONIGHT IN {state}.

We've got to get our content in front of them before the curiosity fades, before they start to question, or simply before they click the "close window" button! So if most people will only wait 2 seconds for something they've deliberately sought out, imagine what their tolerance is like for something they weren't expecting...

And that's backed up by the data here. Search through STM and Affbuzz, and you'll see dozens of stories of affiliates being shocked by how much improving their page and server performance affected their revenue. Here's just one example.

Is there a point at which you REALLY need to worry?

For a simple landing page, and as a very rough rule of thumb, any page loading time beyond 2 seconds is very bad. Generally, you should be able to get below a second as measured using a tool like Pingdom.

But that's not really the right way to look at it. A better question is "how hard will it be to make my page faster?". If you can see any reasonably simple way to speed up your pages - and we've got a case study on this coming in, ooh, about an hour and a half - you should do it!

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Cool stuff caurmen! thanks!

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What are the better page load testing tools ?

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They tell you in the post. Pingdom

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Personally, I use Pingdom and Firebug in conjunction - both are good, but give you slightly different information.

If you haven't seen my Landing Page Case Study yet, I use Pingdom quite extensively there in the course of testing a page.

Note, of course, that these are loading speed testing tools, not stress-test tools - you ideally want to test with both, at least until you're sure your server can handle the traffic.

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The free one not the signup one right?
hxxp://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

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240ms is that cool?

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A blink is 300 to 400 ms

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Have some fun.

Test the really cool sites with all the bells and whistles.

http://designova.net/themes/motif/Green-Single

http://www.anariel.com/templatespreview/Trendy_animated

I'm no longer jealous of those that add 7 jquerys , filled with spinning text and images, 6 js's and Dolby surround sound.

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Yep, it's the free tool. Pingdom Paid is great, but for different stuff.

And indeed, it's terrifying what a bit of additional cruft on a page - some animated images, some Javascript, a couple of libraries - will do to your loading times!

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Page speed oh page speed. I have to learn how to code ASAP. More headache is waiting

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