Faster eCommerce Sites = Faster Conversion and Revenue.
Faster eCommerce sites make more money. An eCommerce site’s load speed has a direct impact on the site’s ability to convert customers and drive revenue. It makes sense, customers visiting fast eCommerce sites are going to navigate the site faster and more likely to find what they need quickly. They’re less likely to abandon the site while waiting for pages to load. A fast site is a way for customers to measure and evaluate the importance a company places on it’s eCommerce experience.
- Google uses site speed as a ranking factor for search results
- Walmart found that every 1 second improvement in page load time improved conversions by 2%.
Site speed not only influences the visitor traffic you get (Google). It influences if visitors turn into customers.
Let’s take a look at a practical example with Preat.com.
So, here we are at preat.com. The site seems fine and we’re going to dive into finding some products to purchase and show you a practical example of eCommerce site speed. Let’s click the “Product” menu item and find something to buy. It too 12 seconds from the time we clicked. If we think back to our Walmart example, we could have driven a 24% improvement in conversions. It might be an exaggeration to assume that we’re going to get a 24% improvement in eComm revenue conversion, but it does highlight an area for improvement.
What Do I Do About It?
Understand Your eCommerce Store Speed: First step is to get a better understanding of your eCommerce store’s performance. There are a variety of tools available, and your site may already have these tools setup.
- Google Lighthouse: Google web page quality improvement tool
- Google Search Console:
- GTMetrix: a commonly used website performance measurement tool
Image Optimization: Large images can slow down your site’s loading time. Reconsider how many images your product pages need and compress the images you choose to keep. Image compression and image file conversion tools are widely available on the internet to help you with this process.
Drop the Sliders: Preat.com and many other similar websites have promotional sliders on the home page. Unfortunately, research and our experience indicate that the effectiveness of these sliders is poor. Consider removing them or reducing the number of sliders to improve page load speeds.
These are just a few of the suggestions to improve the performance of your company’s eCommerce website load speed. If you found this video / blog post useful and would like to learn more about how to improve your eCommerce site’s revenue performance, reach out to us at www.kilometermarketing.com.
