Does the page load time of a landing page impact the number of inbound offers you get?

Landing Page

The short answer is – yes. As with most things in life, people are busy and the amount of time someone has to wait directly relates to sales. In the apparel world retailers see this happen in-store all the time, long lines at dressing rooms usually means less sales or less items purchased on average. On a website it means less conversions, and when it comes to getting inbound offers on domain names it means, well, less offers.

I have been testing out a new service for landing pages on some of my domain names called Efty. Overall I have been pretty happy with the service, it’s easy to customize your landing pages and they some great design options. While I think the backend is a little clunky from a UX perspective, honestly the level of customization it provides is better than anything I’ve used before.

Here’s the problem. Since I’ve been using the service I’ve seen my inbound offers drop by quite a bit. So I started to look deeper into the landing pages, was it the text I was using? Maybe the landing page template? None of those seemed like the culprit. Then I noticed, hmmmm, it is taking quite a while for these pages to load.

So I did a test and found that it was taking between 8s – 12s on average for my landing pages to load, here’s an example below:

efty-pageload-times

Luckily the founder of Efty, Doron, is super accessible, any time I’ve emailed him he always responds pretty quickly. I let him know about this issue and he said he would look into it. Then I got an email from him a couple of weeks later letting me know they had identified that issue and were makes some tweaks on their end.

While I don’t think all the tweaks have been made yet I am interested to see how the number of inbound offers changes as the page load time goes up. Right now I’ve seen inbounds drop by around 50% which might be scary for some people but I love experimenting and since I’m honestly so happy with so many other parts of the Efty platform, I’m willing to take a little hit while I wait for page load times to increase.

But if you’re making your own landing pages, make sure to host them on a fast server and avoid fancy landing pages full of Javascript and large images because at the end of the day, the faster it loads, the more inbound offers you’re likely to get.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton