Don’t Make Your Customers Suffer From a Slow Site

65% of digital media time is on mobile, according to comScore. And last year, Google confirmed that mobile searches overtook desktop searches.

The rise of mobile gives you a lucrative opportunity to connect with customers more frequently. Like publishing interesting content via social media, so people can view it while browsing Twitter in the supermarket checkout line. Or having a mobile-first design that makes it easy to check your prices when they’re standing in competitor’s shop.

But there’s a catch.

Not only do you have to be mobile-first with your design (easy to navigate, buttons big enough to tap, copy big enough to read but not so big you only see 3 words per screen – that sort of thing).

You also need to be fast to fit with on-the-go behaviour.

Your web visitors want answers straight away

When people are doing an in-store price comparison, they want to know your prices NOW. Not in 60 seconds once your website finally loads.

When they tap your link on Twitter or Facebook, they want to be entertained IN THAT MOMENT. Not after 30 seconds of staring at a spinning ball.

Kissmetrics did a study of website loading times, and it puts this behaviour in perspective. Think about these statistics:

73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less

2 seconds! And not only do customers have high expectations – they’re ruthless when they think your site is too slow:

40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
If an e-commerce site is making £80,400 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you £2 million in lost sales every year

Think about that: £2 million in lost sales because of 1-second page delay

In other words, you can’t afford to have slow-loading mobile content. You need to speed things up. And that’s where Accelerated Mobile Pages, an open-source initiative, comes in.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) makes it easy to build fast mobile web pages

AMP has 3 elements:
HTML with custom properties that enhance performance
JavaScript library that helps your pages render quickly
Google AMP Cache that fetches pages, caches them and improves page performance automatically

If that sounds technical, and you don’t have to worry about what’s under the bonnet. In layman’s terms, AMP involves a performance-enhancing code you integrate into your website. It directs how your site loads so the content at the top appears first – and fast. That way people can start reading immediately without having to wait for all the background activity to finish.

So when you’re planning website improvements, make sure you think AMP

AMP puts your website in the fast lane. Visitors are happy, because they get answers and/or entertainment exactly when they want it. Google is happy and boosts your search rankings accordingly, because it sees people spending more time on your site.

And you’re happy, because you’re getting more visitors who convert at a higher rate.