Slow sites dramatically reduce purchase intent. Simply put, faster is better than slower.
Even with big brands like Amazon and Walmart, people are not willing to wait to get the products they love. For Amazon, each 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales. For Walmart, they gain an extra 2% in conversions with every second of performance improvement. This shows that every second counts.
According to Visiture and Shopify, 64% of smartphone users expect a website to load in 4 seconds or less and 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The last thing you want from your visitors is getting annoyed and frustrated with your business not because of design or content, but simply because of loading speed.
Luckily for you, this is not totally out of your control. Things you can do include:
- Use tools such as Google PageSpead Insight, GTMetrix and Pingdom to help you assess your site’s current loading speed and level of optimization
- Optimizing your store so that it loads in less than 3 seconds to load.
- Optimizing your store for both desktop and mobile.
This article won’t go into full detail on how to optimize your site, but here are 9 tips on how to make your website faster.
Overall, it is a good idea to invest in the speed of your site. Instead of having online shoppers bounce from your site to another site based on speed, like 14% of shoppers reported doing, you can keep visitors at your site if your page loads fast enough. This is great for the customer and great for you, as they find what they are looking for faster and you get their earned loyalty and business.
How have you gotten your page loading speed down and has it been worth the investment so far?
Sources
- Designing for the Appearance of Speed (Mobify)
- Why Does Mobile Commerce Matter? (Big Commerce)
- The Future of Mobile Commerce (Shopfy Plus)
- Ultimate Guide to eCommerce SEO in 2018 (Visiture)
I’ve gotten our page load speed down a bit, difficult to know the exact benefits this has caused but based on the research into how much site speed affects conversion rates, I am sure it has helped!
Hey Daryl!
Thank you for sharing.
Looks like you have a pretty good score on Desktop, with a score of 89%. Your mobile version needs some optimization, with a score of 4% : ) See the Google PageSpeed Insights report.
Let me know if you want some help with that, I know a team who does wonders with site speed optimization and SEO. I actually hired them for a couple of clients already and they’re awesome.
Also, I see a potential synergy between BigFlare and Sales4U since we’re serving the same market. Happy to connect and chat!
Cheers.
To me, working on page speed is as good as working on a car in the garage. I’ve got the need for speed, baby!
Vroom Vrooooom!!
Very helpful! I always thought it WAS out of my control. I had no idea. Thank you!
It is very much under your control, though it depends which platform you’re on. For example, you’ll have less control on Shopify than you will on WordPress or a custom-made website.