Are mobile sites getting slower instead of faster?
Fifty-eight percent of mobile users expect sites to load at least as quickly on their mobile devices as on their desktops. You would think this expectation would lead to increasingly faster m-commerce sites, but the opposite seems to be the case.
According to industry benchmarks from Gomez and Keynote, mobile sites seem to be getting slower, not faster. Currently, the average m-commerce site loads in 5.47 seconds. A year ago, that number was 4.73 seconds.
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There are a few potential culprits here, such as oversized graphics and poorly optimized widgets, but pointing fingers doesn't fix the problem. Site visitors want a fast online experience, not excuses.
The psychology of mobile users: Hunters versus browsers
It's easy to understand why a fast online experience matters to mobile users. People using their mobile devices are usually on the move, whether they're shopping, ordering event tickets, or trying to find a restaurant. They're in "hunter" mode: they know exactly what they're looking for, and they're much more likely to become impatient with a site that doesn't immediately deliver.
You also have to consider the aesthetics of the average mobile experience. Simply put: compared to using a desktop, it's not pleasurable. You have tiny fonts, plus images so small as to be meaningless, and they're all squashed into poorly optimized pages that don't even fit in your screen. Being forced to endure a long wait time just to be served this kind of site is like adding insult to injury.
Is it any wonder that despite the holiday success of top-tier sites such as Amazon and eBay, most companies are still struggling to see any ROI from their mobile sites?
Only 5% of companies see ROI from their mobile sites
This is because most companies don't even have a unique mobile presence, and of those that do, many aren't measuring success.
In July of this year, a staggering 88% of companies surveyed were still serving their desktop sites across all platforms. This is a huge factor in why mobile performance is so poor.
The good news is that of the 12% of companies that do have a mobile strategy in place, almost half report seeing positive ROI.
The bad news is that of that same 12% of companies, about a third have not even measured their ROI, largely because they don't have a strategy for measuring the effectiveness of their site.
So how do you measure the relationship between mobile performance and mobile success?
The easiest way to make mobile development a priority is to identify a clear connection between performance and key performance indicators such as conversion and revenue. This is something that the e-commerce community needs to address -- and quickly. It took almost 10 years for e-commerce to generate meaningful data around regular Web performance. We don't have that luxury with the mobile Web.
Right now, there is very little hard data, but we're starting to see some numbers trickling in. In one example, this past year a leading online auto parts retailer conducted an A/B test of its mobile site, accelerating half of its traffic and leaving the other half unaccelerated. It appeared that speeding up the site by 40% caused the average order size to increase by 3% and conversions to increase by 5%. The site conducted another A/B test, during which it slowed down the performance of its mobile site. It found that when the site loaded in 7 seconds, the conversion rate suffered a 20% hit.
Tips for giving your visitors a fast mobile experience
When the dust settles after this holiday shopping season is over, the smart companies will regroup and take what they've learned to retool their mobile sites. Here are some of the tips they should be considering:
Bingo! Marketers are reacting to mobile in two ways 1) "I need a mobile site. I don't care how you do it, but give me a mobile site" or 2) "Only 5% of our traffic is coming from mobile. That's not enough to justify a separate site".
Very few are approaching it from the perspective of trying to be ahead of the curve with a mobile site that is carefully engineered from the ground up. Cramming the same information architecture and site flow of a standard site into a mobile site is as silly as making a mobile phone with a tiny corded handset. To give an optimal mobile experience, you need to start with a blank page and rethink everything based on the way people will want to use and experience the site.
- Jeff Greenhouse
Now if the phone was the size of an iPod with that size screen;).........
Great content+ Great UI&UX=happy mobile experience