Pagespeed, conversion rates and causality
I’m convinced now - page speed matters – it makes a difference on your conversion rates !
I’m currently quite busy starting a new venture including a webshop and as part of this reading up on a lot of webdesign issues related to conversion rates.
Among many factors increasingly articles points to load time for the webpage as an important factor for your conversion rates,
I’ve been a bit sceptically about how important the pagespeed could be as long as it were “decent enough”, until reading this article about speed/revenue analysis of your ecommerce site.
From a real life test of a customer site the findings were
- Site was 30% faster in IE8.
- The value per visitor on his site was 29% higher for IE8 than it was for IE7
- Shoppers with T1 connections spent roughly 32% more than those using dialup
Now – as the article states; “Correlation does not imply causation” …. a good statement I’ve also noted from my interest in statistics, and as a good analytic an obvious contra argument for causation would be that people who upgrade to IE8 and/or have a T1 connection belongs to a segment which generally buy more.
But here comes the final good argument:
Keeping all other variables constant, only changing pagespeed, optimizing the page loadtime made a huge difference on sale value!
On average, order value for the optimized site was 20% greater than for the unoptimized site
No more blogging for this article … I’m off optimizing my webshop !
Related articles
- Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache (googlecode.blogspot.com)
