53%
of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load.
Google & SOASTA Research, The Need for Mobile SpeedThe Research
Signals worth noticing
What the research keeps showing about speed, trust, and the way people actually browse, and what we do about it. Every number here has a source.
Speed
+8.4%
lift in retail conversions from a 0.1 second improvement in mobile load time.
Deloitte & Google, Milliseconds Make Millions
100 ms
of added latency cost Amazon roughly 1% of sales, an early and much-cited link between speed and revenue.
Greg Linden, Amazon experimentsHow load time is measured
Most modern studies track when the main content becomes visible, a metric called Largest Contentful Paint, using data from real visitors rather than lab machines. That is the number we watch too: it reflects what a person on a mid-range phone actually experiences.
SmallPie editorialSpeed is a design decision, not a server setting. Every element a page carries is a choice about someone else's waiting time.
Every build gets a performance budget
Before design starts we set a weight and speed target for every page. Images are sized and compressed for the layout they sit in, scripts stay minimal, and we test on mid-range phones over cellular data, not just office wifi.
People decide in seconds, not minutes.
SmallPie editorialFirst impressions
75%
of people judge an organisation's credibility by the design of its website.
B.J. Fogg et al., Stanford Web Credibility Research
50 ms
is all it takes for a visitor to form a visual first impression of your website.
Lindgaard et al., Behaviour & Information Technology
38%
of people stop engaging with a website when the layout is unattractive.
Adobe, State of Content reportSmallPie editorialTrust is built from quiet things: aligned type, honest spacing, consistent colour. Nobody notices them, yet everybody feels them.
The aesthetic-usability effect
People perceive attractive interfaces as easier to use, and forgive them more when something goes wrong. The effect is well documented in usability testing by Nielsen Norman Group. It is why visual polish is not vanity: it directly changes how capable your website feels.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Dieter Rams
Attention
Finding 01
Most visitors leave within 10 to 20 seconds unless the value is obvious.
Nielsen Norman Group
Finding 02
People read at most 20 to 28% of the words on a typical page.
Nielsen Norman Group
Finding 03
57% of viewing time happens above the fold, before any scrolling.
Nielsen Norman Group, scroll studySmallPie editorialOne idea per screenful. If a section needs a paragraph to explain itself, it becomes two sections.
People ignore design that ignores people.
Frank Chimero
Reach & access
~60%
of global web traffic now comes from mobile devices.
StatCounter Global Stats
1.3 billion
people, about one in six of us, live with a significant disability.
World Health Organization
69%
of UK shoppers with access needs click away from sites with barriers, an estimated £17.1 billion in walked-away spending.
Click-Away Pound Survey, 2019An accessible site is not a special version of your website. It is the version.
SmallPie editorial
Accessibility that pays for itself
Real colour contrast, visible keyboard focus, semantic headings, and text alternatives for imagery. The same choices that open a site to assistive technology also make it clearer, faster and easier for everyone else.
Fast, clear, and honest wins.
SmallPie editorialConversion
~70%
of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout is completed.
Baymard Institute, running average of 50 studies
22%
of shoppers abandon because the checkout is too long or complicated.
Baymard Institute, checkout usability research
−7%
conversion for every extra 100 milliseconds of delay at retail scale.
Akamai, State of Online Retail PerformanceContent precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it is decoration.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Where checkouts leak, and how we seal them
Fewer fields, guest checkout by default, all costs visible before the final step, and no surprise account walls. Then we watch the numbers after launch, because a funnel is never finished, only improved.
Brand
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs
+33%
revenue is associated with presenting a brand consistently across every touchpoint.
Lucidpress & Demand Metric, State of Brand Consistencyis how much a single, consistently used colour can lift brand recognition.
One owned colour, used everywhere, makes a brand faster to recognise and easier to trust. We lock the palette early and hold it across the whole system.
SmallPie editorialA small design system, one palette, two typefaces and a handful of components, keeps every page saying the same thing. That consistency is what the numbers above are really measuring.
The Takeaway
Make every second count online.
The numbers all point the same way: people decide fast, on their phones, and design carries the credibility. We build for the way people actually browse.