In today’s world, people want to get information as fast as possible. This is why mobile page speed has been a ranking factor in mobile searches since 2018. Search intent still has a very strong signal, but what that means is if your site is not performing well on mobile it might be harder to find.
More importantly, is the effect site speed has on a user’s experience when interacting with your site. Performance is about the user experience. According to Google, 53% of users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load.
Knowing this it made me think about how well non-profits sites are performing. And the results were shocking! As you can see below, there is a good trend for desktop performance but mobile performance is not great! Especially since 52% of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices.
According to M + R Benchmarks, the majority of nonprofit website traffic came from users on mobile and tablet devices. Mobile accounted for 48% of all traffic, tablets for 8%, and desktop users made up 44% of traffic.
What do the scores mean?
By the way, you can find your score by entering your website address at PageSpeed Insights
Now more than ever our sites are doing so much which lead to performance struggles. At best, they create small delays that are only briefly annoying to your users. At worst, they make your site completely inaccessible, unresponsive to user input, or both.
As a non-profit, your website is crucial to spread your message, get volunteers and receive donations. Performance is about improving these conversions. Retaining users is crucial to improving conversions and having a slow site has a negative impact on this.
This is clear when looking at the data. M+R Benchmarks have found that desktop users accounted for the majority of donation transactions and revenue. While just 44% of traffic, desktop users made 63% of all donations and contributed 71% of revenue. Mobile accounted for 21% of all revenue, a 15% increase from 2017.
What can you do? To start, go to the page speed tool, put your site through it and see what the recommendations are. There might be some quick wins there like compressing images better or reducing the number scripts your website is using.
