Why Page Speed Matters
Page speed has a wide ranging impact on both user experience, and on key ministry metrics. Some these factors include awareness, engagement, conversion rates, retention and so much more.
Awareness:
Google has made both Page Speed and Core Web Vitals (impacted by page speed) prominent factors in their ranking algorithms. While this may not sound significant, the M+R Benchmark study found that on average 45% of traffic to nonprofit website's come from Google Organic search. Our Ministry Benchmark Study found that the majority of ministries receive more than 50% if their traffic from Google Organic search. So when it comes to driving new traffic to your ministry website there is no more important factor to take into account.
Enagement:
People have to engage with your ministry and your content before they will become supporters. Nothing kills engagement faster than a slow website. 24% of users will leave your website if it takes longer than 4 second to load, and 65% will leave if it takes longer than 10 second. Google's research shows that 70% of mobile web pages take longer than 7 seconds to fully load visual content above the fold!
Conversion Rates:
You likely don't want people to just hang out on your website, you want them to take action. Surprise surprise, page speed impacts this as well! Studies have shown that a webpage that loads in 1 second or less will convert on average 3x better than pages that load in 5 seconds and 5x better than websites that load in 10 seconds or longer. Could you use 3x-5x more email subscribers, or donors? Page speed might get you there.
And thats not all...
There's even more data out there showing page speed impacts the full user experience, even as far as impacting retention. But you get the idea, and can do your own Goolge search if you're craving more data :-)
Next Steps:
- If you haven't looked into page speed before start by finding your baseline. Tools like Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix make it easy to do this.
- Signup for Google Search Console if you don't already have an account (it's FREE). This will allow you to see real user data on page speed performance for all pages on your website.