Page speed and ads: why a slow website costs you more

When someone clicks your ad, you pay for the click whether or not the page ever finishes loading. A slow page is the one place where ad money is lost after the ad has already done its job.

What the research says

Slower pages lose more visitors. Google’s 2017 research into mobile landing pages found that as load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving straight away rises by 32%. From one second to five seconds it rises by 90%, and from one second to ten seconds by 123%.

Small improvements show up in the results. In 2019, Deloitte and the analytics firm 55 studied 37 brand websites and about 30 million visits for a report commissioned by Google, “Milliseconds Make Millions”. For the lead generation sites in the study, making the mobile site 0.1 seconds faster was linked to an 8.3% improvement in bounce rate on information pages.

Two cautions. The Deloitte study was commissioned by Google and covered large brands, so do not expect the same percentages on a small business site. And the 2017 figures are probabilities from a model, not a promise. The direction is what matters, and it has been consistent for years: faster pages keep more of the visitors you paid for.

Why speed matters more when you advertise

• You have already paid. A visitor from a free Google result who gives up costs you nothing. A visitor from an ad who gives up costs you the click.
• Most ad clicks are on phones. Often on mobile data, where a heavy page is at its slowest.
• Google looks at the landing page too. Landing page experience is one of the things Google Ads weighs when it decides how much you pay per click and where your ad shows.

All of this feeds your cost per lead. If one visitor in five leaves before the page loads, every lead costs you a fifth more than it should.

How to check your page

1. Test the page your ads point to, which is often not your homepage.
2. Run it through PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free tool, and look at the mobile result first.
3. Try it yourself on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off. If you get impatient, so will your visitors.

The fixes that make the biggest difference

• Shrink the images. Oversized photos are the most common cause of a slow page. Resize them to the size they are shown at and save them in a modern format such as WebP.
• Remove what the page does not need. Sliders, autoplay video, chat widgets, pop-ups and unused plugins all add weight.
• Cut the tracking clutter. Old tags from tools you no longer use still load on every visit.
• Turn on caching. A caching plugin serves a saved copy of the page so the server does not rebuild it for every visitor.
• Check your hosting. Very cheap shared hosting can be slow no matter what you do to the page.
• Use a dedicated landing page. A single page built for one campaign is lighter than a full homepage, and it converts better too.

How fast is fast enough?

Aim for the main content to appear within about two and a half seconds on a phone, which is the threshold Google’s own tools treat as good. If you are well above that, speed is probably the cheapest improvement available to you.

Want this done for you? Send me your website and I will reply in writing with the three biggest fixes for your ads and leads. Get a free lead review.

Sources

• Think with Google: new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed (Google/SOASTA research, 2017)
• Deloitte: Milliseconds Make Millions (commissioned by Google; 37 brand sites)