AutoAnything reduced page load time by half, they saw a boost of 12% to 13% in sales.
Retailer Furniture Village audited their site speed and developed a plan to address the problems they found, leading to a 20% reduction in page load time and a 10% increase in conversion rate.
When it comes to user experience, speed matters. A consumer study shows that the stress response to delays in mobile speed are similar to that of watching a horror movie or solving a mathematical problem, and greater than waiting in a checkout line at a retail store.
As a site begins to load, there's a period of time where users wait for content to appear. Until this happens, there's no user experience to speak of. This lack of an experience is fleeting on fast connections. On slower connections, however, users are forced to wait. Users may experience more problems as page resources slowly trickle in.
Performance is a foundational aspect of good user experiences. When sites ship a lot of code, browsers must use megabytes of the user's data plan in order to download the code. Mobile devices have limited CPU power and memory. They often get overwhelmed with what we might consider a small amount of unoptimized code. This creates poor performance which leads to unresponsiveness. Knowing what we know about human behavior, users will only tolerate low performing applications for so long before abandoning them.
Poorly performing sites and applications can also pose real costs for the people who use them.
As mobile users continue to make up a larger portion of internet users worldwide, it's important to bear in mind that many of these users access the web through mobile LTE, 4G, 3G, and even 2G networks. As Ben Schwarz of Calibre points out in this study of real world performance, the cost of prepaid data plans is decreasing, which in turn is making access to the internet more affordable in places where it once wasn't. Mobile devices and internet access are no longer luxuries. They are common tools necessary to navigate and function in an increasingly interconnected world.
Total page size has been steadily increasing since at least 2011, and the trend appears to be continuing. As the typical page sends more data, users must replenish their metered data plans more often, which costs them money.
In addition to saving your users money, fast and lightweight user experiences can also prove crucial for users in crisis. Public resources such as hospitals, clinics, and crisis centers have online resources that give users important and specific information that they need during a crisis. While design is pivotal in presenting important information efficiently in stressful moments, the importance of delivering this information fast can't be understated. It's part of our job.
Read up on the Core Web Vitals to learn about the metrics that Google believes all websites should focus on.
Today, we’re building on this work and providing an early look at an upcoming Search ranking change that incorporates these page experience metrics. We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.
Evaluating page experience for a better web , Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
Then check out Fast load times for lots of tips and tricks related to getting fast and staying fast.