Landing pages: Bringing Speed to the Money Page [Infographic]

Tuesday Oct 11, 2011 by Coach Wei - CEO, Yottaa

First impressions count and perceptions about your brand identity, offering and call to action all converge on the landing page.  It does not matter if the landing page is a product page with a description of a consumer product offering or an invitation to a webinar for a business-to-business website, the landing page is where the “rubber hits the road.”

One of the most overlooked success factors for a landing page is speed. The page needs to load quickly. Website visitors today have a tolerance of about 2 seconds, after that your landing page bounce rate begins to increase.  A page that takes more than 6 seconds to load is dead in the water in 2011. Consider this: Shopzilla.com, a popular ecommerce shopping portal succeeded in reducing their loading time from 7 seconds down to 2 seconds, and their conversion rate increased by 7-12%, they observed 25% increase in page requests.  Or how about this, Amazon stated that a 100ms delay in page load times resulted in a 1% drop in revenue.

Those are big numbers. And they are compounded by the marketing spend numbers. Pay-per-click campaigns like Google AdWords, banner advertisements, emails with links – all of these vehicles drive traffic to the landing page –at a very high cost.  With the added cost of the development and creative time spent building and implementing these landing pages, these pages are a huge investment.  All of these expenses are at risk if the landing page is slow. 

Slow websites also affect brand perception.  Visitors’ attitudes toward a brand are formed within a few seconds, and a slow website that they never see is a lost opportunity to make an impression.  It might be worse if that first impression, once the page appears in the browser, is the impression of a slow website. Not only is the visitor less likely to perform the call to action, they are less likely to visit additional pages or share the link in their social network.

The best landing pages load in less than three seconds.  How fast are your landing pages?  How does your Web development team monitor and ensure all of your landing pages have the same speed?  And realistically, how much can you spend to impact speed? Yottaa, a Boston based company focused on Website Performance, offers a free service to test website speed from a global network of monitoring points. Today, we are launching a service that makes websites faster and requires no code changes or hardware to install and maintain.

Yottaa Site Speed Optimizer offers small- and mid-sized organizations around the globe access to the kind of performance expected from the big sites – without the big site costs. You can check us out for free for 14 days – and see just how fast your landing pages can be.

Coach Wei is the CEO of Yottaa in Cambridge, MA.  You can follow Coach (@coachwei) on Twitter by clicking here.

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