By Susannah GrayDirector, Communications

A recent report — Milliseconds Make Millions — commissioned by Google and published by Deloitte, has shown that mobile website speed has a direct impact on user experience. Reducing latency and increasing load times by just 0.1 second can positively affect conversion rates, potentially leading to an increase in net earnings.

Over a four-week period, Deloitte's research team analyzed mobile web data from 37 retail, travel, luxury, and lead generation brands throughout Europe and the U.S. Results showed that by decreasing load time by 0.1s, the average conversion rate grew by 8% for retail sites and by 10% for travel sites. The team also observed an increase in engagement, page views, and the amount of money spent by website visitors when sites loaded faster.

Multiple studies have consistently shown that faster page load speeds result in better conversion rates. Akamai's 2017 Online Retail Performance Report, for example, showed that a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can reduce conversion rates by 7%, and that over half (53%) of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

There's good news: making some relatively simple changes to your webserver configuration could help to improve your website's user experience as well as making it more available.

Implementing HTTP/2, for example, can speed up webserver performance by enabling browsers to download multiple files simultaneously over the same connection. This means that all of the files needed to display a webpage are downloaded faster, enabling users to access content sooner.

And, as more and more people come online, it's likely that they will be connecting via IPv6 rather than over IPv4. By ensuring that your website is available over IPv6, the number of users that could potentially visit your site is greatly increased. IPv6 also optimizes the route that Internet traffic takes, which can lead to improved website performance.

The Internet Society's Open Standards Everywhere (OSE) project promotes the use of open internet standards that can help to improve website speed, security, and availability. We're working to equip everyone with the knowledge to make simple changes to some of the most widely used webservers (including NGINX and Apache) by providing simple how-to guides for enabling HTTP/2 and IPv6, as well as other standards including TLS 1.3 and DNSSEC.

First, test your website to see how well it supports open Internet standards. If you're at 100%, congratulations — your website users are already getting a more enhanced experience! If you don't quite get a perfect score, we might be able to help.

The conclusions are clear: as the number of consumers connecting to the Internet increases, those businesses that can deliver a faster online user experience for visitors will benefit from a higher conversion rate than those that can't.

But it's not just online retailers and e-commerce that should be paying attention: any call to action on your website can be considered a conversion. Requesting signatures for an online petition, asking people to support community networks, or recruiting new members for an Internet Society Chapter could all potentially be positively impacted by increased website speeds.

So what are you waiting for? Find out how to take action now.