Mobile is no longer on the sidelines. If you're not a already thinking mobile first, you're should at least consider it. Let's go over compelling data, demonstrate the importance of focusing on performance for mobile devices.
Business was booming on the Mobile Web
Here is some figures showing the rapid growth of business on the mobile web.
55% of all time spent on retail sites takes place on mobile devices
This number comes from the Shop.org1, released last fall. 44% of the time people spend on retail sites is on smartphones, and 11% on tablets.
This finding correlates to a statistic is shared by uk-based online shoe retailer Schuh.com:Every Month, 1% of Thei R Desktop traffic converts to mobile traffic2.
Mcommerce (Mobile Commerce) revenue is growing rapidly
Between and, mobile revenues in the US more than tripled.
In, Mobile generated 16% of total ecommerce sales. Then, that number would increase to 26%.3 Think 26% sounds insignificant? It's not-unless think $113 billion is a trifling amount of revenue.
Mobile conversion rates lag behind desktop, but tablets is catching up
At the end of this year, the conversion-smartphone users were about a third the rate for desktop users.
Tablets, however, is catching Up:at 2.59%, the conversion rate for Tablets in the last quarter of had surpassed Fir St Quarter for desktop users.
Source:monetate.com
Most online shoppers "multi-screen" before they buy
More findings from comscore:in their February market review, they found that 57% of consumers access a company ' s sit E from both their PC and mobile devices before buying.4 This puts a great deal of pressure in ecommerce developers to Ensu Re a consistent user experience across all platforms.
Source:comscore.com
Mobile Sites Don ' t Meet Users ' expectations
Looking at all the stats we ' ve just covered, there's a clear disconnect between how much time people spend on retail mobil E sites (55%) and how much money they spend during, that time (16%) 5.
There was a number of factors to explain the disconnect, but a critical one was page speed.
Slow pages is the number one issue this mobile users complain about, ranking even higher than site crashes.
Most mobile users expect pages to load at least as fast as (or faster than) they load on their PC
I need to stop being surprised if I talk to people who assume that mobile users would settle for sluggish load times, bec Ause that's just the mobile world spins.
Those individuals couldn ' t be more wrong:85% of mobile users expect pages to load as fast as, or faster than, they load o n the desktop.
The three smartphone users say they expect pages to the load in 4 seconds or less.6
Slow pages increase user frustration and decrease engagement during online transactions
Mobile users is affected at a neurological level by even small changes in a site ' s speed.
In an electroencephalography (EEG) study we-ran last fall, we found the 500ms delay in connection speed resulted on up To a 26% increase in peak frustration, and up to an 8% decrease in user engagement.7
Top sites aren ' t meeting mobile users ' expectations for sub 4-second load times
Most users could expect wait times of 4 seconds or less, but we research8 shows that the majority for sites can ' t deliver th Is kind of the speed to mobile devices.
Last fall, we measured the load times of the top ecommerce Sites-both the full-site version and the M-dot version- On a variety of smartphones and tablets. We found that even m-dot sites, which is intended to deliver a faster experience, generally failed to meet users ' 4-secon D wait-time threshold.
Source:radware.com
Only 2% of the Full-site versions loaded within 4 seconds, with the median load time being almost 8 seconds.
Source:radware.com
What Poor Mobile Web performance Means
The disconnect between user expectations and the reality of the current state of mobile Web performance have a measurable I Mpact on the bottom line.
Slow performance affects every business metric site owners care on, from shopping cart abandonment to brand perception.
The mobile shopping cart abandonment rate was 39% higher than the abandonment rate for desktop
The abandonment rate-for-mobile shopping carts is 97%, compared-70% for desktop carts.9 This tells us-people are u Sing their carts on mobile, which are good, but then they ' re ditching them, which was obviously bad.
Slow performance is a critical factor, as is the pain of filling of a long order forms.
Even a 1-second delay can hurt conversions
Even seemingly minor performance problems can has a major impact on mobile business metrics.
A while back, we do a split test over the course of weeks, in which we segmented mobile traffic to an ecommerce into F Our groups:a fully-optimized control group, plus three groups, were subjected to 200ms, 500ms, and 1000ms HTML delays .
We measured the impact of these delays on:
- Bounce Rate
- Conversions
- Cart Size
- Page views
The 200ms delay yielded negligible results, but the negative impact is much stronger at 500ms and 1000ms.
The 1000ms delay resulted in a 3.5% decrease in conversions, which is huge hit.7
Slow pages Drive Mobile shoppers to your competitors
When their shopping experience goes wrong, not only does mobile consumers abandon their shopping carts, they also head to yo ur competitors.
When faced with a negative mobile shopping experience, up to 33% of mobile shoppers would go to a competitor ' s site next.
To make things even worse, up to 30% would never return to your site.10
Slow pages undermine overall brand health
In the same study I cited earlier, we asked all the participants in our mobile EEG study for their impressions of the site S after the tests were done. We then fed all the descriptors in the interviews into a word cloud generator.
This is the word cloud, is generated by test participants after using tesco.com at normal speed:
And this is the word cloud, which was generated by participants after experiencing, the same site with a 500ms network delay:
Bear on mind that's none of our test subjects were aware this they ' d been involved in a study on page speed. They thought they were simply testing each site ' s overall functionality.
It's fascinating to see this word cloud for the slower site contains almost three times more negative adjectives than The faster site.
While some participants clearly picked up on the slight deterioration in performance ("Slow" and "sluggish"), participants Also developed negative perceptions of areas that is unrelated to speed.
Slower pages affected people ' s perception of three important aspects of the site that is completely unrelated to load Tim E:
- Content ("boring")
- Visual design ("tacky" and "confusing")
- Ease of navigation ("frustrating" and "hard-to-navigate")
Why the Mobile Web is Slow
Aside from the obvious known limitations of mobile Devices-smaller CPUs, slower network download Speeds-there is Other limiting factors:
- Page size
- Latency
While responsively designed pages can is fast, most aren ' t (even on the desktop)
Responsive web Design is a great the ensure that your pages has a consistent look across multiple platforms, but it's Not necessarily a great the "to ensure" that your pages is consistently fast across platforms.
I recently tested the start render and load times of $ pages that has been included on various "Best of RWD" lists. Only 3 of them loaded in 4 seconds or less-on desktop no less-meaning This they ' re likely to load even more slowly on Mobile devices.
The culprit:massive payloads.
Of the responsively designed pages I looked at, many were 3 or 4 or even 5 MB in size.11
One thing the fastest sites all had in common is the fact that they were all under 1 MB.
Never underestimate the performance-killing power of latency
In performance terms, latency are the amount of time it takes for the host server to receive and process a request for a PA GE object.
The amount of latency depends largely on what far away the user was from the server.
Mobile latency is consistent with its inconsistency and even when measured at the same location. This was due to a number of variables beyond the amount of data passing through the tower. Factors such as the weather, and even the direction the user is facing, can has a significant impact.
Source:igvita.com
3G latency can reach 350ms or more per page resource. and a typical page can easily contain or more resources, so all this latency adds up fast.
This is what Google performance expert Ilya Grigorik has stated12 so if you ' re designing for mobile, it's safe to assume You ' re going to incur 2000ms of 3G latency.
What can give your mobile audience the user experience they demand?
There is a number of techniques for optimizing mobile performance.
Some of these techniques-such as compressing and consolidating resources-can help with both mobile and desktop issues.
Others-such as leveraging Localstorage as a workaround for smaller mobile browser Caches-are specifically focused on I Mproving the mobile experience.
If you're interested in taking a deeper dive to these techniques, check out this posti wrote for Acmqueue.
Note from the Editor (Jacob gube)
If you ' re curious to learn more about Tammy Evert's theories on Web performance and mobile, being sure to attend her sessions At O ' Reilly ' s Velocity conferences the year.
Velocity is, in my opinion, one of the conferences all developers should go. A lot of data, best practices, and techniques related to Web performance is born at this conference.
Use code SIXREVISIONS20 if getting your ticket to save 20%.
Tammy'll is in Santa Clara on June 24-26 and New York on September 15-17. These is her topics and additional information about the sessions:
- Mobile Web Stress:understand The neurological Impact of Poor Performancesanta Clara, June 25, 2014
- Everything wanted to Know about Web performance (but were afraid to Ask) New York, September 15, 2014
- Progressive Image Rendering:good or Evil? New York, September 16, 2014
References
- ComScore and shop.org Mobile Retail Boot Camp (summit13.shop.org)
- Conversion Conference–schuh ' s Journey to RWD (slideshare.net)
- Mobile Devices to Boost US Holiday Ecommerce Sales growth (emarketer.com)
- UK Digital Market Overview February (comscore.com)
- Keynote Mobile User Survey (keynote.com)
- Mobile stress:slower Web pages leads to increased user frustration and lower engagement (webperformancetoday.com)
- report:2013 State of the Union for Mobile Ecommerce performance
- Google Aims to simplify Mobile shopping with ' Instant Buy ' (webpronews.com)
- Case Study:the Impact of the HTML delay on the mobile business Metrics (webperformancetoday.com)
- 88% of Americans who shop on their smartphones Experience negative issues ... (marketwatch.com)
- Websites that prove RWD and performance CAN play well together (webperformancetoday.com)
- Latency:the New Web Performance bottleneck (igvita.com)
Reasons why should pay Attention to Mobile Web performance