Picture this: You're on your phone, waiting with bated breath for midnight, when the latest greatest game console finally gets released. You Google the console to track down where to order it - the site is a few results down on the page, but you find it eventually. You click the link. The loading bar creeps tantalizingly across the screen...and then grinds to a halt! Not to be deterred, you toss your phone aside, open your laptop, and try the ordering site again. It takes a minute, but eventually loads. Huzzah! You hit the button to add the console to your cart...but your browser freezes! By the time you restart it and try the site again, the console is SOLD OUT. Furious, you vow then and there never to buy that brand of console again.
Ok, so perhaps it's a bit dramatic and contrived, but the purpose of this story is to illustrate the perils of poor site performance. Delayed page loads, slow interactions, and many other performance problems can lead to a frustrating user experience, and make it more likely that potential customers will bounce from your site.
Performance issues can be even more pronounced on mobile devices due to less processing power and slower network connections. This is especially significant considering that, in 2023, people used their mobile devices for browsing over 3 times more than desktop. Let that sink in. 75% of the time, your users will be using mobile devices that, by their very nature, increase the likelihood of encountering performance problems if you haven't put in the work to optimize. 75% of the time, there is an increased chance of a potential customer giving up on your site.
Google also factors your pages' performance into their search results ranking algorithm. That means it's theoretically possible that your page could get bumped down below a similarly relevant page if it doesn't perform as well, all other factors being equal. The farther your site is from the top of the search results, the less likely it is to be clicked on. The following chart illustrates the exponential drop-off in click-through rates as you go farther down the list of search results:
Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-first-page-clicks/374516/
Note how the click-through rate at position 2 in the list is almost HALF that of the top position. And if your site gets bumped to the dreaded second page of results? Well, less than 0.5% of users will even bother to look.
Going back to our would-be gamer at the start of this post, let's step through the story again with a newfound understanding of what happened. Our gamer started out using a mobile device, which automatically made everything run slower (certainly not the user's fault, but a factor nonetheless). When they Googled the console site, it took a tad longer to find since it showed up farther down the page than expected. This lower Google ranking likely resulted from the site itself having performance issues - as our gamer soon discovered for themself, first on their phone, then on their laptop. In the precious minutes they wasted in trying to find and load the website, the product they were seeking was sold out, and the console company lost a loyal customer.
Let this be a lesson: when setting up your website, you might be immediately concerned with making sure the core functionality works properly, the interface flows well, and the homepage design looks awesome - all important considerations, to be sure. But you should also be factoring site performance into every stage of your site's development, ESPECIALLY when thinking about the mobile user's experience. I'll show you how in future posts!
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