First date? New Business Meeting? According to the latest research, you only have 27 seconds to make a solid first impression with the person you just met. But what about online brands?
Written by Noel Pennington
When the pandemic took a grip on the world we all settled into our favorite leisurewear, found the least noisy room, turned on our webcam and picked some exciting backgrounds to start our meeting. In that virtual world, what happens to those first impressions if you have technical issues on Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams or any other video conferencing tool we’ve all had to spend our lives on? How long have we got then to make a good first impression?
27 seconds does not seem like a long time, now think about three seconds. Some hummingbird’s wings beat at over 50 times per second or 150 times in three seconds. The fastest land animal can travel 102 feet in 3 seconds. A supersonic plane can cover 3 miles in three seconds, and if you are a brand, you could lose a customer in three seconds.
As Retailers, we know that it can take a long time to win a customer over, but if your website’s first impression takes more than three seconds to load then defection rates among customers and visitors will be high.
3 seconds or they’re gone
The three-second rule is well-established and maintains that the majority of customers will not wait more than 3 seconds on your website or app for a page to load.
That means from the home page to the product details page, you only have about three seconds to make a great impression. The pandemic has only made this more important as 60% of global consumers are changing their shopping habits and 37% planning to shop more online. Even sites like Amazon and Walmart can suffer from performance issues meaning slower load times. change can have a significant impact. In a recent report from Walmart, just a 100 millisecond improvement on Pagespeed grew revenue 1%, with a one-second improvement Pagespeed increasing conversions by 2%.
There are several ways brands can reduce the time it takes to load a particular page increasing the likelihood of a sale.
In a recent report from Walmart, just a 100 millisecond improvement on Pagespeed grew revenue 1%, with a one-second improvement increasing conversions by 2%
Understand Your Current Speed
Start by not only testing your home page but spot check individual product pages, both desktop and mobile. Tools like Google PageSpeed or Pingdom can provide an idea of load times and possible fixes. Google PageSpeed is free, and Pingdom has a cost after a 30-day trial with the prevailing thought that Google uses an emulated browser vs Pingdow using a real browser.
Content Distributed Network
Using a Content Distributed Network or CDN allows Retailers and Brands to reduce the physical distance between their content and consumers. This can help consumers to view the same quality content reducing load times associated with distance.
Moving to the Cloud
Consider moving the eCommerce application to the cloud. There are many business advantages to moving eCommerce applications to the cloud, including decreased data center cost and elasticity on scaling your eCommerce application up and down. This allows Retailers and Brands to add servers when needed like Black Friday and Cyber Monday and decrease load times overall. Companies such as AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Platform have many programs that help Retailers and Brands move their application to the cloud.
Development enhancements
Then there are the typical development enhancements like minify CSS and javascript, enabling compression, leveraging browser cache, improving server response time, etc.
Either way, your first impression as a brand is only three seconds. Get it right and a customer buys what they need and that customer might be yours for a lifetime, get it wrong and you could lose revenue or damage your brand reputation.
At Daemon we look at the retail sector of eCommerce to test how pagespeed varies from site to site. We analyse a number of data points and metrics to calculate a score and present these brands on a leaderboard. That enables us to help our customers develop blazing speeds for their sites.
Find out more
https://www.dae.mn/solutions/pagespeed-leaderboard/