What is the mobile page speed of your car dealer website? Does it load in two seconds or less? Three seconds? Four?
“2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
That came from Maile Ohye, who oversaw Google’s Search Console product until 2017. She’s now Senior Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn. When she talks about mobile page speed benchmarks, the rest of the internet better listen.
Get It Loaded Now
A recent study by Gomez.com (now Dynatrace) found that more than half of website visitors demand two-second web page load times.
When you’re a car dealer, the market is far too competitive to keep visitors waiting. If you don’t make your mobile car dealer website faster, your competition will. Now is the time to optimize that slow mobile website. Consider the following:
- Mobile sites with a two-second or faster loading time produced 15 percent higher conversion rates.
- As mobile page speed slowed from one to ten seconds, visitor bounce rate increased 123 percent.
- A 2017 study by Akamai showed that 75 percent of visitors wouldn’t even return to a website taking over four seconds to load.
You Better Be Mobile
The mobile web accounts for over half the web searches and over 60% of the shoppers who visit our dealer websites are on mobile devices. People search at work, on the subway, over lunch and in the airport, you name it. Mobile devices deliver the ability to search the moment a car shopper thinks about something. If you’re not building with at least a three-second mobile page speed in mind (since 2 seconds can be hard to achieve), then you’re probably wasting money on your car dealer website.
Turbocharge Your Mobile Site
Because of access speeds and how many phones work, the mobile version of a website often loads more slowly than the desktop version. There are several ways to improve a website’s mobile page speed benchmarks:
- Test and Retest: Don’t take your speed for granted. Talk with your provider and test your site. Discuss ways to improve your speed. Sometimes your provider might have things that they need to do, but often you will have work to do too. See the following “junk” bullet about what some of that work might be…
- Cut Back on Unnecessary Junk: All those flashing things, beautiful car pictures and shiny buttons add a huge penalty in load time for the mobile version of your car dealer website. Mobile sites need to be clean, simple and to the point. So tone it down. It is more important that you have a fast mobile website than one with a bunch of bells and whistles. One place where you can often make quick changes is to kill the slideshow on your mobile site. Most of these are a waste of time anyhow since VERY FEW people sit and watch the ads. We did this with a Honda customer a little while back and it made a HUGE difference on load times.
- Simplify: Less clutter and clear calls to action will make your mobile visitors – which are a majority of your total visitors – happy. Talk with your provider. Work with them to eliminate the clutter and focus on what drives most people to your website… shopping for cars or getting their car serviced.
The Final Verdict
The goal for your mobile website is to get it to load within two seconds or less. Full stop. We know that it can be hard to achieve this goal because we are always pushing dealers to cut back on material that only hurts their load time and doesn’t help them make a new sale. But goals are made to keep you focused. If you can’t achieve 2 seconds, then work hard on 3.
Just remember: According to a study done by Google, “as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%”. If that doesn’t concern you, I don’t know what will. So get cracking and speed up your mobile site!
That’s It For 2019!
This is our final post for 2019. Suffice it to say, it has been a good year and we want to thank everyone who has contributed to our little company’s rebirth. Thank you and all the best for the New Year!