The Importance of Mobile Page Speed for Manufacturers
Do you know why theme parks are visited by millions of people each year? Because theme parks contain roller coasters, and roller coasters go fast. We like things that go fast, but especially when the “thing” is a web page on our mobile devices. (Bet you didn’t think this blog post would start out with a roller coaster analogy!)
According to data from Think With Google in 2018, 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. How long does it take your site to load? There’s an easy way to find out. Plug your website’s URL in here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights. What’s your score? You should see something like this:
As you can see, our page speed on mobile is smack in the middle of average. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible, either. For comparison, view our page speed on desktop:
Much better, right? There’s a noticeable difference in our page speed from desktop to mobile. Unfortunately, manufacturers these days can’t just get by with a relatively fast website load time on desktop. Mobile page speed is important for manufacturers like yourself. Here’s why.
The Importance of Mobile Page Speed for Manufacturers
To get started, let’s look at how many users, on average, view a site on mobile. Recall that data from Think with Google? The answer is 53%, over half. Of course, this number varies depending on the industry that you’re in and how your key demographics use your site. But even if the number for your manufacturing company isn’t quite half, it’s likely still a noticeable amount.
What’s my point? The point is, your mobile site visitors are just as important as your desktop site visitors. If you’re concerned about the experience that desktop site visitors have on your site, you should also be concerned about the experience of mobile site visitors.
Mobile Page Speed and Bounce Rates
Now that we’ve established that site visitors are getting to your site via mobile, consider what happens when those would-be visitors wait for the mobile version of your site to load. In a word, they leave. Here’s data from Google to prove it: (click to open larger version of image)
If your company’s website takes 6 seconds to load rather than 1 second, the probability of a bounce rate increases 106%. Mobile page speed and bounce rate are linked. Pay attention to your bounce rates, especially on mobile. You’ll find that by improving the one, you’ll be improving the other.
Mobile Page Speed and SEO
As of July 2018, Google began considering page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches. Is SEO a priority for your manufacturing company? If so, page speed on mobile should be optimized just as the meta descriptions, page titles, URLs and site content are.
Mobile Page Speed and PPC
Are you spending any of your 2019 marketing dollars on search engine marketing like Google Ads? These “pay per click” or PPC ads are effected by quality score – the better your quality score, the further your money toward ads will go. A company’s quality score is determined so that Google knows how good of a user experience your landing pages provides. If your landing pages have a very slow load time, that will bring down your quality score. If you’ve got a low enough quality score, Google might even stop showing your ads. It’s that important.
If you hadn’t before considered the importance of mobile page speed for manufacturers, we’ve just given you three very good reasons to do so no longer. The importance of mobile page speed is only going to continue to increase, and the faster you can improve your mobile page speed, the better positioned your manufacturing company will be in the future.