I meet with hundreds of business owners and executives every year. All brands, whether small or international, have something in common: they want to grow. And while there are as many growth strategies as there are types of companies, there is one area where almost all can improve: the mobile web.
Mobile remains the most used platform in a world where people have more ways to search, explore and buy than ever before. However, it is not enough to be present. To grow, companies must offer a fast mobile experience, one that users expect and demand today.
In the retail sector, we see that a one-second delay in the loading time of mobile devices can have an impact of up to twenty points on the percentage of conversions. In turn, 54% of users express that the longer the loading time of a brand’s mobile site, the greater their frustration. This puts all companies with a mobile presence in front of two options: provide customers with the type of experience they expect or prepare to see them go to another site with a lower loading time.
If a slow mobile experience drives customers away, a fast experience can help attract and retain them.
However, I often notice that companies do not invest enough in offering fast mobile experiences that can generate revenue and brand loyalty. It is not that companies do not understand that this type of experience is important, but they tend to consider it as a goal and not as a constant job. Regardless of how fast a site is, speed must be prioritized continuously.
The example of market leaders
Brands considered “successful” include a wide variety of companies that benefited from prioritizing providing a fast mobile experience.
It is key, for example, to avoid large images and slideshows on a mobile site, as their slow loading directly affects the quality of the user experience. Through a combination of browser caching, image optimization and prioritization of content in the visible part, the German e-commerce company bücher.de only loads images if they appear in the area visible to the user. Through this and other optimizations on its page, it was able to increase its speed by 33% and reduce its loading time to 3.5 seconds.
The speed of the mobile site also helped boost the growth of Telefónica, one of the most important telecommunications companies in the world. Taking into account that more than 70% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, the company set out to increase sales, reduce transformation costs and increase self-management: the team decided to test Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open source standard that allows mobile web pages to load almost instantly. Thanks to AMP, Telefónica improved the loading times of its mobile site by 70%, that is, it went from six to just two seconds in 3G connections. That allowed it to increase the click-through rate by 31%.
Even if a company is not dedicated to e-commerce, speed on mobile devices can affect the final results. BMW proved it when it renovated its mobile site in order to evoke the same sensations of speed, performance and reliability of its cars. The company boosted its website through the use of AMP pages and progressive web applications (PWA), an innovative technology that provides reliable, secure and seamless experiences, and responds quickly to user interactions, even in conditions of poor networks. What happened next? In addition to achieving a loading time up to four times faster on its website, BMW managed to get the proportion of people who clicked to access its sales site to rise from 8 to 30%, which represents an increase of almost 400%.
Analyze the speed of your mobile site in detail
Choosing where and how to invest are some of the most important decisions that companies must make, and at Google we want to facilitate this process so that they make smart investments in improving mobile speed. That is why we present the new tool Test My Site, which helps brands to understand, measure and compare the speed of mobile sites.
This solution accompanies companies of any type and size, and allows them to take the necessary measures to grow. The key is to learn to provide the fast experiences that consumers demand on mobile devices.
