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I need to convince my team that our load times are way too high. Load times for the /cart is around 10 seconds and load times for individual pages are around 6 seconds. I've seen all the studies about why your website should load in under 3 seconds. However, I can't seem to pinpoint in Google Analytics the proof that slow load times are affecting my conversions.

I've looked at year over year speeds vs. bounce rates, month over month bounce and exit rates, pages per session over periods when load times are high, etc.

There is so much data that seems to contradict itself. Sometimes a significantly higher load time has no impact on pages per session or exit rate. Also, this is a high volume traffic retail website.

So the question is: What metrics can I use to demonstrate that slow page load times are affecting our bottom line?

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low bounce rate in high load time page maybe comes from the interest of users to your service. in normal situations, you may not wait for loading a heavy or slow page and immediately exit the page. but when you interested in services (or products) that offered on a particular page, you would wait for it.

I think your team is right about page speed optimization, but the fact is that you can have an "interested and satisfied" users against "just interested" users.

by optimizing page speed, you can achieve that kind of user, interested and satisfied.

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If you have consistently poor load speeds, and that's been the case for a significant length of time, it probably isn't possible to make a compelling case with your own data.

It sounds like you have no "good" to compare with, and small-scale tests would probably be tainted by the extreme poor performance on the rest of the site.

I suggest forecasting potential revenue gain. Use the studies you mention to estimate CVR (or a range of CVRs) for your revenue-driving pages if they were faster to load, and calculate the next year's revenue based on existing AOVs. If you can estimate the cost of the work needed to achieve the new speed, and from there the ROI, so much the better.

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  • Interesting thought. I have data from years back when the site ran much quicker. Perhaps I could look at the number of pages per session before a purchase is made and see if more page views increases the likelihood of a purchase. The old data has 30% more pages per session on average. Any idea on how I can use GA to accomplish this?
    – Troy
    Commented Dec 4, 2019 at 17:21
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You cannot easily show this in Google Analytics as it's registering only successful visits. What you have to focus on is external tool measuring clicks vs landing page views. Example: If you run Facebook Ads you can easily see how many people clicked on the as and how many people actually landed on a page. If your website is slow you will see a kot of people clicking but not many landing on pages. With fast website those 2 figures are usually closer to each other.

Also with a little bit of technical knowledge you can place a small code in the top header section of your website to register clicks in your database and then you can compare those clicks with visits registered by Google Analytics, that way you could show the difference between Cart Clicks VS Cart Visits.

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