It’s 2020. Are your mobile landing pages optimised for speed?

It's 2020. Are your mobile landing pages optimised for speed?

Whether you run a retail store, health and fitness blog, not-for-profit, or anything in between, lightning-fast mobile web experiences are a must. If your pages take too long to load, web visitors leave and go elsewhere.

Speed means revenue

53% of visitors leave a mobile page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Getting your page load speeds under three seconds may seem far-fetched, but every millisecond counts.

According to Google, your probability of a bounce increases exponentially with each additional second your mobile web page takes to load.

Source: Think with Google 2018

With the amount of effort you put into your SMS and mobile marketing campaigns, this isn’t ideal. All of your email marketing campaigns, mobile search traffic, and digital ads may get you all the traffic, but it’s not helpful if they leave before the page loads.

Whatever marketing mix you run, the majority of your customers likely visit your website from their smartphones. Last year (2019), Adobe reported that 57% of all web traffic and 35% of purchases came from smartphones.

A few years ago (2016) it was 39% and 21% respectively. Imagine the number of additional conversions and revenue you may get if your mobile pages loaded faster than 3 seconds.

Tools to help you improve mobile page load speeds

Google reported that the average mobile page load speed is 15 seconds. So here lies an opportunity to beat your competition by improving yours if you haven’t already.

To start, we recommend that you read our blog post about how you can design conversion optimised landing pages. It’s a two-part series that provides you with quick tips and examples. Next, you can use these tools to help you optimise your pages.

Google PageSpeed Insights

There are plenty of free tools, like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, that can give you a free analysis of your mobile web pages. It’s technical, but it gives you a good bird’s eye view of what needs improvement.

Image Optimisers

For marketers, image optimisation is the low-hanging fruit. PageSpeed Insights will give you a list of images that need optimisation. Then, use a free tool like Kraken.io (PNGs) or Jpeg.io (JPGs) to help. For the rest of the technical jargon, you can pass that onto your developer.

The speed of SMS marketing

Since we’re on the topic of speed, let’s look at some of the statistics.

Based on a customer survey a few years ago, we learned that SMS campaigns typically take under 10 minutes to create. When we asked them about other tools like Facebook Ads, over half said that it takes more than 30 minutes. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Many SMS campaigns are under 160 characters long.

There’s also the open and read speed. 90% of recipients open their text messages within three minutes, and anecdotally speaking, text messages take about a second to read.

Our online SMS service also lightning-quick. We can deliver approximately 18,000 SMS per minute, and our average delivery time is under four seconds. We recently updated our web platform to give our customers more speed and reliability.

Final Thoughts

While 5G networks will improve speed, it’s not something to count on any time soon. GSMA predicts that only 15% of the world will have a 5G connection by 2025.They also expect to see 359 million new mobile subscribers in the Asia-Pacific region. That means more and more smartphone traffic, so an optimised mobile web experience is a must.

If you’re not already a Burst SMS customer, give our online SMS service a try with our 14-day trial. No obligations and no credit card required.