Why Does eCommerce Website Speed Matter?

Why does site speed matter?

In short, time is money and a slow website inevitably means a higher bounce rate and lower conversion.

In today’s economy, we are on the fast train to efficient production and value creation. It’s not just millennials, we are all more or less spoilt by instant gratification. From a quick serve meal from McDonald’s, an Uber to the local shops and international overnight delivery of product you could have waited longer for.

Such anticipation of fast results is imposed on almost every industry now. The same applies with eCommerce, staring at a slow-loading eCommerce website is frustrating. The longer it takes for your eCommerce website to load, the less your customer’s interest will maintain. With customer acquisition being an expensive exercise, you want to maximise each client visit to your site.

Fast site speed improves conversion

Customers are expecting things to be a click away and that click is expected to take only 2 seconds to load. Does your website load in 2 seconds?

Hubspot referred to the research result complied by Skill.co showing a few statistics from the AI healthcare software company mPulse. It displays the relationship between site speed and conversation rate – less loading time results in a higher conversation rate.

Fast site speed boosts your SEO Ranking

It’s not only customers that prefer fast loading sites but Google itself and other search engines. In 2010, Google decided that site speed would be one of the factors influencing rankings on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Eight years later, this consideration has expanded to mobile devices.

For search engines, it is more likely that your site will be placed to a higher position if the site loads fast. Therefore, the improvement in site speed is a win-win to both user/owner.

How to optimise site speed

There are quite a few techniques such as speeding up image loading by resizing and reformatting files to be screen-friendly. Our recommendation is to optimise Javascript and CSS of your website to see a more significant improvement.

Playtime has recently helped Carpet Court increase their site speed from 11.9s to 4.0s. The issue lay in unoptimised Javascript on their site making their site speed slower than necessary. With our deep understanding of Magento development, this issue was quickly resolved within 2 weeks. Their overall health score improved from 19 to 87 out of 100.

Before

30 days after

What should you do for the eCommerce website speed?

First, it is worthwhile finding out if site speed optimisation is a priority for your business. It is extremely easy to check your site performance by using Google Lighthouse or Pingdom. If your site speed is anything higher than 4s, it’s worth improving it.

Find a technical partner who knows how to improve site speed. Playtime is your trusted eCommerce partner who has a proven track record of improving site speed for Australian retailers like Carpet Court (300% improvement) and White Runway (150% improvement).

For personalised site speed tips for your website, contact Playtime for a website diagnosis.