Slow Loads Sabotage Your Conversions: See the 2019 Page Speed Report

[Zoltan_Ilku]

Hey everyone! Zoltan here from Unbounce’s Customer Marketing team.

We’ve been shouting from the rooftops, metaphorically speaking, about page speed for the last little while, which is why I’m excited that my first community post is about some mind-blowing new findings.

Our research shows that marketers need to make page speed a priority, and we have stats to back it up.

Did you know that 86% of women between 18 and 24 admit they’re less likely to buy something when a web page is slow to load?

It’s a clear sign of how long waits—by “long” we mean more than 3 seconds—can take a chunk out of your bottom line. But, heck, it’s also kinda intuitive, right?

How about this one:

19% of marketers don’t think that load times have an influence on their conversion rates.

So perhaps it’s not so intuitive after all.

We just released a Page Speed Report for Marketers about what consumers and marketers are thinking and doing about page performance in 2019. Last fall, we asked 750 consumers and 395 marketers about spending habits, advertising priorities, mobile web experiences, and more.

We learned:

• 81% of marketers agree slow page speeds influence their conversions

• Accelerated Mobile Pages are a mystery to most marketers, though 76% have at least heard of them

• 53% of marketers would give up videos if it meant faster loading pages

• And lots more…

[SEE THE FULL REPORT HERE]

We hope these findings will encourage a more accessible web and eventually lead to better internet experience for everyone

How do you feel about page speed? Is it a priority for you this year? Let us know your thoughts about the report and/or what you hope to see more of. We’re all ears!

Zoltan signing off

[alltyres]

That’s great, but I notice the unbounce pages can sometimes load a bit slow. Maybe it’s geography since our customers are in Australia?

[Jess]

Hey @alltyres!

Good question! There’s a few ways to diagnose slow pages, this community post is a good place to start: Checklist: How To Speed Up Your Landing Pages

Unbounce has five data centers around the globe, your landing pages and popups should load quickly no matter where you’re located.

We aren’t finished rolling out page speed improvements, so keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks.

Let me know if you have any questions!

-Jess

[Ryan]

Hey @alltyres – Echoing Jess here. There are a bunch of factors that will impact your page load times and geography, as you pointed out, can be a big factor if your visitors are far from our servers. Jess noted that we have 5 global data centres (plus a content distribution network) to tackle that problem so things on that front are typically solid.

We’d usually advise running your pages through Google’s Page Speed Insights to see what recommendations come up. With Speed Boost, which we rolled out last year, the majority of Google’s delivery recommendations are handled for you, plus we’ll be releasing Auto Image Optimizer very soon which will trim any big (and slow) images for you. If you have any custom scripts on your page, those can reeeeeally drag your speeds down. Lastly, we opened up our AMP Beta last week so you could test building an AMP page which, thanks to AMP cache and some under the hood features, can get you blazing fast, near-instant speeds.

That said, we’ll shoot you a direct message so we can help you assess your pages and see what’s up.

[alltyres]

Auto image optimiser would certainly be good. I’ll run the page through the page speed test tools and see what they recommend. Thanks!

[JJJ]

Howdy folks, I posted this in the technical questions area a moment ago but this seems relevant to this post.

We have built some nice GIF images for our pages, problem is that they are fairly large in size. We prefer to stay with the GIF format so the images will auto play.

Is anyone aware of a good way to preload or even compress GIF images so they are minimal in size?

Images are live here | www.HookUpUnlocks.com