Not Much for Etailers to ‘Like’ About Social Plug-Ins
Social plug-in performance
One second is how long Google’s +1 plug-in drags down page-load time, and that’s not “just” a second when research shows that ten percent of site traffic is lost for every extra second a site takes to load.
Facebook’s ubiquitous ‘like’ plug-in stalls page load time by approximately .2 seconds. This means featuring both plug-ins on a page adds c. 1.2 seconds to its load time. That translates to more than a 10% loss in visitors, and by extension, in conversion.
Otherwise put, an online business with $35 million in revenue could lose over $3.5 million in sales using just these two plug-ins.
Adoption of Google’s +1 plug-in has been astonishingly fast. Last week, BrightEdge released a report on the adoption of social sharing plug-ins on websites. Their study found c. half the top 10,000 websites have a link to their Facebook pages from their home page and (talk about early adoption!) Google+ is already in second place. In fact, Google’s +1 plug-in is already more widely deployed than Twitter’s share button.
Smart Tag Loading (STL) is the solution for social plug-in page drag as well as how tags affect page load speed.
Web page response over time
Webpage response comparison of different social plug-ins
Many thanks to our friends at Catchpoint, a web performance monitoring company, who were kind enough to provide the charts illustrating how social plug-ins affect page load time in milliseconds.
Has your site been affected by Google’s +1 plug-in? We’d love to hear about it in the comments section.
I think that during the days of dial up this would pose a possible problem, but in a world were most users are on high speed connections, 1.2 seconds should not be an issue. Also for the biggest websites in the world, which is a majority adding these plugins, their visitors will be less affected by pages loading slow, since their traffic is at least some percentage of returning, and know what to expect.
Another side bar for thought, For “Facebook’s ubiquitous ‘like’ plug-in stalls page load time by approximately .2 seconds. This means featuring both plug-ins on a page adds c. 1.2 seconds to its load time. That translates to more than a 10% loss in visitors, and by extension, in conversion.
Otherwise put, an online business with $35 million in revenue could lose over $3.5 million in sales using just these two plug-ins.”
Referring to that wouldn’t it also be logical to argue that if the facebook and google plugins bring in more than 10% more traffic then in fact it is more valuable than the traffic lost by the load times? I would argue that these social tools are worth more value then harm.
Thanks for sharing the data. However, claiming that the correlation between % loss of visitors and £ loss in revenue is linear is unproven. I agree that page load speed is important from a usability perspective and people (me included) get annoyed and leave to find a quicker website but that’s not indicative of propensity to purchase. I would argue that someone like me who gives up after 2 seconds, isn’t that committed to visiting that website in the first place, so my propensity to buy/convert is far lower than someone who really wants to visit. The person who really wants to visit is more likely to wait an extra second.
Now, that is of course theory as I don’t have any hard facts to prove it. If anyone has, that would be wonderful data to behold.
thanks
james
I should clarify my comment on unproven. What I meant was that’s not consistent across every website as I’ve seen retail sites slow down load speed with new page elements and not see a drop off in conversion.
Pingback: Google+ Could Cost Online Retailers Millions - Webmaster Forum
Totally agree, Unbounce did a blogpost on that: http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/are-third-party-tools-conversion-killers/
Adding more javascript and killing user-experience is something that we are tempted to do, but the dangers are huge, especially for large websites.
Great chart!
The easy solution is to load the buttons asynchronously. My Like and Twitter buttons load after the page content. The content on the page is fully loaded, then the Like button pops on. The Twitter button has nowhere near the delay.
Google just release an async method for the +1
http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/
You could also wrap it in a jquery $(window).load function so that it loads when the page AND content if finished.
Pingback: Google+ Plug-In Now 2X Faster | TagMan
Pingback: MediaPost Raw » Blog Archive » Google Speeds Web Site Page Load Times
Pingback: How Your Website Loses 7% of Potential Conversions – wordpress email plugin
Pingback: How Your Website Loses 7% of Potential Conversions