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How Website Performance Impacts Your Business

Howard Wilson

Website and application speed is a core experience metric that many companies focus on. For good reason – It's widely accepted that digital assets need to load in three seconds or less, otherwise 40% of your audience will abandon.

Following this theory, US telco T-Mobile and Dynatrace recently conducted a study into the importance of site and application speed, and the impact on consumer satisfaction and conversions. The data was vast, involving every session for 379k unique site visitors and looked at various business transactions.

Here's some of what the report found:

Faster Page Loads = Completed Orders

Visitors that completed orders experienced pages 50% faster than visitors who didn't.

1.23 seconds doesn't sound like a deal breaker but T-Mobile's research found that it's the difference between abandonment and conversion. The visitors who experienced good performance were more likely to complete orders (at 2.40 secs) than those who didn't complete a transaction at 3.63 secs.

You can also see in the chart below that the converting customers (orange dots) all hovered in the 1 second to 5 second range.

Image removed.

Slow Pages Reduce Conversion Rates

The report found that visitors who experience five pages loading slower than five seconds were half as likely to convert than the visitors experiencing no pages slower than five seconds. The comparison on conversion rate was 18% vs 38%.

Image removed.

Web Speed is Critical on the Front End of the Experience

When it comes to web page speed, first impressions are the most important. T-Mobile's analysis found that visitors viewing pages earlier in the transaction journey (i.e. Home page and Log-in page) were more sensitive to performance issues than when viewing later pages, such as Purchase pages. This makes sense: the deeper customers go into transactions, the more committed they are to completing them and, therefore, the more patient they are. Slow pages early on and people find it easier to abandon.

The chart below shows data for the Home page and Log-in page. Conversion rates decrease consistently to the 6-7 second time mark, as page speed slows:

Image removed.

Speed Matters Most on Product Pages

Poor performing product pages, regardless of when they appeared in the customer journey, had a significant impact on the visitor abandoning the transaction.

T-Mobile found that conversions drop 60% when product pages take longer than 10 seconds to load – from 25% conversion for a page load of 0-1 second to a 10% conversion rate at 10+ seconds.

Image removed.

Speed is Crucial Across the Entire Site

Even when T-Mobile removed product pages from the data, conversion rates were still impacted significantly by response times. The data shows that across the board consumers who averaged a 0-1 second response time were converting at a rate of 40% compared with a conversion rate of 29% for those experiencing pages taking 10+ seconds to load.

Image removed.

The results show how much of an impact website performance can have on your business. How is your organization planning to make the most of customer interactions across digital channels?

Howard Wilson is General Manager, Digital Experience, at Dynatrace.

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How Website Performance Impacts Your Business

Howard Wilson

Website and application speed is a core experience metric that many companies focus on. For good reason – It's widely accepted that digital assets need to load in three seconds or less, otherwise 40% of your audience will abandon.

Following this theory, US telco T-Mobile and Dynatrace recently conducted a study into the importance of site and application speed, and the impact on consumer satisfaction and conversions. The data was vast, involving every session for 379k unique site visitors and looked at various business transactions.

Here's some of what the report found:

Faster Page Loads = Completed Orders

Visitors that completed orders experienced pages 50% faster than visitors who didn't.

1.23 seconds doesn't sound like a deal breaker but T-Mobile's research found that it's the difference between abandonment and conversion. The visitors who experienced good performance were more likely to complete orders (at 2.40 secs) than those who didn't complete a transaction at 3.63 secs.

You can also see in the chart below that the converting customers (orange dots) all hovered in the 1 second to 5 second range.

Image removed.

Slow Pages Reduce Conversion Rates

The report found that visitors who experience five pages loading slower than five seconds were half as likely to convert than the visitors experiencing no pages slower than five seconds. The comparison on conversion rate was 18% vs 38%.

Image removed.

Web Speed is Critical on the Front End of the Experience

When it comes to web page speed, first impressions are the most important. T-Mobile's analysis found that visitors viewing pages earlier in the transaction journey (i.e. Home page and Log-in page) were more sensitive to performance issues than when viewing later pages, such as Purchase pages. This makes sense: the deeper customers go into transactions, the more committed they are to completing them and, therefore, the more patient they are. Slow pages early on and people find it easier to abandon.

The chart below shows data for the Home page and Log-in page. Conversion rates decrease consistently to the 6-7 second time mark, as page speed slows:

Image removed.

Speed Matters Most on Product Pages

Poor performing product pages, regardless of when they appeared in the customer journey, had a significant impact on the visitor abandoning the transaction.

T-Mobile found that conversions drop 60% when product pages take longer than 10 seconds to load – from 25% conversion for a page load of 0-1 second to a 10% conversion rate at 10+ seconds.

Image removed.

Speed is Crucial Across the Entire Site

Even when T-Mobile removed product pages from the data, conversion rates were still impacted significantly by response times. The data shows that across the board consumers who averaged a 0-1 second response time were converting at a rate of 40% compared with a conversion rate of 29% for those experiencing pages taking 10+ seconds to load.

Image removed.

The results show how much of an impact website performance can have on your business. How is your organization planning to make the most of customer interactions across digital channels?

Howard Wilson is General Manager, Digital Experience, at Dynatrace.

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In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025 ...

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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