Count to Three and They’re Gone — Why Page Speed Matters

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

As the number of users accessing the internet from mobile devices continues to climb, an optimized mobile experience is becoming a must-have for healthcare and other industries. Although many hospitals and health systems have incorporated responsive web design into their websites, that may be just the starting point. The next hurdle is performance: How long does it take your web pages to load on a mobile device?

Users may not wait around for your mobile landing pages to load if they take too long. But how long is too long? A mere three seconds could be enough to drive more than half of your site visitors to look elsewhere. Consider these eye-opening statistics from Google, based on its study of 900,000 mobile ad landing pages in 126 countries:

• 22 seconds: the average time to fully load a mobile landing page
• 3 seconds: the amount of time 53 percent of visitors will wait before abandoning a site

Why Marketers Should Care

Petra Gregorová, senior software engineer at Connective DX

What does this have to do with marketing? A lot. If users leave your site before your mobile content even loads, they won’t convert. The Google study found a high probability that as the number of page elements increases, conversion rates will decrease. Yet marketers are sometimes the culprit.

“When marketing gets involved with design, everybody usually wants to see some kind of beautiful imagery,” says Petra Gregorová, senior software engineer at Connective DX in Boston. “But images are the biggest problem, especially if they’re not optimized properly for the web.”

For this article, we explored some of the factors that negatively impact page speed and website performance, and how to overcome them. We also looked at a real-life example of a hospital website that ranks high on the Hospital Digital Experience Index to see how it could be optimized.

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