12 Statistics That Show How Page Load Time Impacts Conversion Rate

The faster your website's load time is, the happier your visitors will be. In other words — when you optimize your web page's load time, you can expect to see improvements in user experience (UX), conversion rates, and ultimately, sales revenue.

You may be questioning whether or not simply shaving a few milliseconds off of your website's page load time really has such a major impact on customer experience and business growth. That's a fair thought — but this blog post, and the 12 website load time statistics below, prove how and why that really is the case.

What is website load time?

Website load time — or web page load time — refers to how long it takes for a website, or web page, to fully load/ appear on screen. This includes all content on the page such as text, images, and videos. Simply, it's how fast all content on a web page loads.

Page speed can depend on a number of factors — some examples include: Page type, user behavior, file sizes, website server/host, inefficient code, hotlinking, and too many plugins and/or widgets.

Additionally, it's important to remember the importance of your website's mobile loading speeds, as well. Jillian Streit, a Website Strategist at Blue Frog, told me: "Page speed has been a ranking factor for many years, and with Google’s shift to mobile first indexing, it is even more important to focus on your website's mobile loading speeds."

She adds, "Unfortunately, most mobile pages take much longer to load than their desktop counterparts, and mobile users expect pages to load much faster on their mobile devices. If the page takes too long to load, users will immediately bounce, causing your site to lose out on a large number of potential customers."

Next, let's explore some website load time statistics to see how your page load time could affect your conversion rates.

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12 Website Load Time Statistics

Here are 12 website load time statistics to give you a better understanding of how it impacts your business and more specifically, conversion rate.

1. The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. (Portent, 2019)

2. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). (Portent, 2019)

3. The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to load. (Google Research, 2018)

4. Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. (Unbounce, 2019)

5. Of all the people surveyed, half said they’d be willing to give up animation and video for faster load times. (Unbounce, 2019)

6. As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%. (Google, 2017)

7. The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. (Google, 2017)

8. The highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds. (Portent, 2019)

9. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 2.11% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-9). (Portent, 2019)

10. The optimal average request count — the number of individual pieces of content needed to display the entire web page — is fewer than 50. (Google, 2018)

11. By compressing images and text, 25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB (which contributes to page load times). Google, 2018

12. Today, even though most web traffic occurs on 4G instead of 3G, the majority of mobile sites are still slow and bloated due to too many page elements. (Google, 2018)

Website load times impact conversion rates and as a result, your business as a whole. Ensuring your load time is as efficient as possible doesn't necessarily take a long time or a significant amount of effort, but it does require some thought. So, start thinking about how you can optimize your web page speed — and as a result, you'll see an improvement in your UX, conversions, time-on-page, revenue, and more.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.