Opinion: Charities miss out on millions every year because of 1 thing

Imagine your NFP website is a runner in a 100m sprint. The start line is when a visitor clicks on your website. The finish line is when you win the attention, time and money of your visitors – whatever goal you have for them being on the website. Your competitors in this race, is your visitor’s distraction, impatience and inertia.

Now imagine you’re trying to run the race with an extra 20kg of weight on your back.

This is what happens when your website is bloated with massive images and weighed down with unused code, plugins, fonts, and scripts.

How many races is the slowest and heaviest runner going to win against its competition? Not Many. Visitor distraction, impatience and inertia will win. Especially in today’s high-paced, low-attention span society.

The issue is nearly all not-for-profit websites are far too slow to load.

Dawn Analytics estimates worldwide, NFP’s lose $1.2 Billion in donations due to slow website loading. People become distracted before making a donation.

Google Global Product Lead, of Mobile Web, Daniel An advised to all that “Speed Equals Revenue.” It could not be truer for most NFP websites.

Let’s run the Facts. Each 1 second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in visitor satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions, according to Aberdeen Group.

A 2016 anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites shared a benchmark data that 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Eight-eight percent of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience, says a report on “Why Web Performance Matters.” The same report also says that 33% of website visitors tell others about their disappointing experience if the website was slow.

Amazon conducted a test which showed they would lose $1,600,000,000 each year if their website slowed by 1 second. They also found that for every 100-millisecond delay in website load time they’d lose 1% of their sales.

Dawn Analytics is donating time and resources to help fix this problem for NFP’s. The social purpose business venture aims at trying to increase the donation revenue of charities websites and it’s all done completely pro bono.

Walmart found that for every 10th of a second-page speed improvement they increased revenue by up to 1%. An increase of tens of millions of dollars.

European digital rail platform Trainline increased website speed by 300-milliseconds. They found an extra £8 Million per year as a result.

Ancestory improved the render time of their web pages by 68%, reduced page bloat by 46% and load time by 64%. Resulted in a 7% increase in conversions – millions of dollars in revenue.

NFP’s have the same opportunity to increase donations by increasing website load speed.

About the Contributor:
Declan Bradfield is the Director of Dawn Analytics

Third Sector

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Third Sector provides high-level content and services for professional development and organisational growth to leaders and senior executives from Australia’s NFP sector and its supporting industries.

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