Top 7 Most Important Attributes of Website Performance

A survey carried out by The Harris Poll in 2015 with 2044 adults aged 18 or over reveals the leading attributes of website performance. The results are listed below and they show that an easy to navigate website is the number one attribute of a high performance website.

So, here is the result of the poll:

Easy To Navigate (79%)

Visitors should be able to browse the site easily and reach the content and pages that they want – and that includes having an easy to understand menu of the most important pages that lead to sub-pages easily.
The site shouldn’t have too many levels deep because that will confuse visitors and take longer for them to reach inner pages. The site should have a consistent design across pages and categories, to ensure greater visitor satisfaction.

Speed (73%)

Website speed is the second most important factor that is of interest to visitors and they won’t hang around to wait for your site to load if it’s slow and unresponsive. They are likely to leave and will go to a competitor site to find what they need. It’s important to monitor the speed of your website regularly and tools like Google Developer Insights shows how fast it is and what you can do to improve the speed. You should aim for a speed below five seconds for all pages and eliminate any features and content that slow it down.

Reliability (68%)

The site should be reliable and easily accessible when needed by visitors. That includes being fast loading and easy to navigate and should not suffer from any downtimes especially at peak times.

Doesn’t Crash (62%)

Sites crash for many reasons and it’s one of the things that frustrate visitors. Make sure that you have enough resources including bandwidth and disk space to meet the needs of your visitors as they browse, download, interact and use your website.

Responsiveness (56%)

Responsiveness is especially important on mobile devices such as Smartphones and Tablets and a mobile responsive site will keep visitors longer on the site and bring them back for more. A responsive site will also rank higher on Google for mobile searches and Google has started penalising sites on mobile devices that are not responsive.

Simple Layout (51%)

Many website visitors will have little browsing experience and a complex website is likely to confuse them. A site should be simple but not bland or cheap and it should have any easy to understand layout that visitors can ‘get’ in seconds.

I can always find the products that I need (44%)

The most popular products should be showcased in prominent places like the homepage or just one click away from the homepage. The site should have a good navigation structure that’s easy to understand and there should be a search button to make finding products easier and quicker.

Personalised Content (13%)

Personalising the experience is one of the least important factors to website performance according to the survey results, however, it’s still an important factor that can lead to high customer retention. Amazon is a site that does personalisation very well and this is one of the reasons it has been successful at retaining customers.

Other (4%)

There are many other important attributes to website performance but in all they represent about 4%.