marketingTechnology

How E-commerce Site Speed Impacts Sales and SEO – And What You Can Do About It

Contents

Unfortunately, many companies fall short in determining the impact a decrease in loading speed can have on their revenue. In reality, inefficient site speed can cause explicit issues for your e-commerce site. Google considers high latency to be a reason for loss of engagement. You are then left with limited visibility. That in turn hampers all other avenues of growth for your business.

This article will help you understand why working on increasing the site speed should be at the top of your to-do list. 

How Site Speed Directly Affects Your User Experience

In this context, user experience is more important than anything else. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a sluggish e-commerce website is a deterrent to customer satisfaction and retention. Let us show you how speed interacts with each of the building blocks of user experience – from perception to behavior – site speed.

1. First Impressions Happen in a Blink

Users decide about a particular web page in a period of less than 50 milliseconds. Site speed is among the first elements they check, content or design comes second. Note that a significant 40% quit a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load without even scrolling down. The assumption is even higher for mobile users because of their relatively shorter attention span.

2. Scrolling Convenience

When one visits a fast site, it is easy to go from page to page, click, and fill out forms. Loading delays interfere with the smooth navigation process which is very irritating. In the case of slow-loading sites, more people are likely to abandon a crucial step during the process, which could be browsing products, or even checking out. A second delay in page loading time correlates negatively with conversion rates and impacts the figure by 7%, according to recent studies.

3. Emotional Reaction and Trust Level 

Speed in a subconscious way conveys a sturdy and dependable expert nature of the website. In this relationship,  we understand that a slow site means a bad impression of a positive emotional nature and vice versa for a fast site. It goes without saying that other factors kept constant, faster websites command an even higher level of trust from users. Apparently, 88% of online shoppers will not revisit the same site if they had a bad experience there. 

4. Host of Devices Cannot be Left Out How It Works

E-commerce statistics indicate that over 60% of the traffic comes from mobile users but these users still grapple with slow connections. Optimized sites meet the desired objectives of all users, as they load quickly even on a mobile network. Hence, a bad site speed on mobile phones always drives away customers, for instance, 53% of them tend to turn away from a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. 

5. Multitasking Becomes Less Glaring How It Works

People tend to focus on what is important and that is your goods and material when a site tends to load quickly. Unlike slow sites that keep users waiting with long waits, these sites increase the amount of thinking caused by the irritation that comes with it. On the other hand, quick-loading pages keep things simple and stress-free resulting in higher satisfaction rates. This means higher engagement with pages and longer sessions as well.

6. Making Errors During Buying

To a consumer, e-commerce is first and foremost impulsive and they tend to make quick decisions over the important items they want to buy. Every second that the user stays idle tends to create a hindrance in the process of making a purchasing decision. Thus, conversion occurs significantly more frequently on pages that take two seconds to load, as users experience less interruption due to frustration or distraction.

The SEO Power of Site Speed

As much as site speed is intended to enhance customer interaction, it is a paramount consideration for search engines too. By Google’s standards, websites that load quickly are given preference because they enhance the experience of their users. So why should e-commerce stores care about the site speed and what does it have to do with SEO performance?

1. Google’s Core Web Vitals

Google takes into consideration Core Web Vitals metrics to evaluate a page’s speed. These include:

  • Largest Contentful Paint. How long does it take for the most salient part of the content on your page to appear depending on what you intended the load time to be ideal value: 2.5 seconds.
  • First Input Delay. How long does it take to get your site fully interactive after it loaded ideal: 100ms.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift. A metric that evaluates the stability of visuals during a site’s load time ideally less than 0.1.
  • The Impact. The failure of a website to exceed the aforementioned thresholds results in a drop in ranking leading to lesser visibility and organic traffic.

2. Bounce Rates and Dwell Time

Site speed is a major determinant of an individual’s actions. If a page is taking longer than normal to load, then users are likely to not stick around for too long thereby increasing your bounce rate.

A site’s non-engagement leadsto poor rankings which are indicated by high bounce rates within the search engines. However, faster load times ensure users remain on-site for a longer duration, increasing the dwelled time and ensuring rankings are improved.

3. Focus On Mobile

The primary focus has shifted with regards to Google as it now looks at the mobile access version of the site when determining its indexing and ranking. Users on mobile are used to slower connections at times, thereby allowing for a greater expectation of faster loading pages. Not only do mobile sites that load slowly frustrate their users but they also are the reason behind drastic drops in one’s ranking. Research indicates mobile sites when loading around 3 seconds have session rates that are 70% higher. 

4. Crawling and Indexing Efficiency

The search engine bots that are crawling through your site do so with a set logic and time-based budget. If the pages respond slowly, this time budget requires increases, and for a few pages, the logic does not allocate time for indexing. Hence, an increase in loading speed for a site means that every targeted keyword or page would be indexed and crawled, thereby increasing the chances for better rankings than before. 

5. Competitive Edge

In industries (such as e-commerce) where multiple companies target the same keyword, speed is the distinguishing factor.  In fact, more organic traffic is released when sites have a faster response time in addition to the paid ads being of less need. Kozak Group incorporates all aspects of a Site Performance that complement SEO. 

Business Revamping by Modifying Site Speeds

E-commerce is the business for the future, so every second matters. But how are sales affected by the site speed?

1. Swifter Sites Lead to Sales that Convert

Speed is where each seamless shopping experience begins. When pages take under 2 seconds to load, the conversion rates surge drastically in contrast with lower speeds. If the load time is one second longer, it can potentially reduce the conversion by 7%. Hence, an e-commerce business with a monthly revenue of $100,000 can experience a loss of $84,000.

2. Checkout Friction and Cart Abandonment

Users usually abandon a purchase if there are slow load times when adding items to the card or making a payment. Just imagine that 18% of online shoppers give up on their shopping since the site is slow, and for mobile users, the percentage is much higher.

3. Impulse Purchases Require Speed

Impulsive buying is a core principle in e-commerce.  Pages that take up to 2 seconds to load can convert up to 2 times more users than those that take 5 seconds or longer. When a page does not load fast enough, an impulse is lost and customers are able to think and reconsider the purchase, or check prices from other sellers. 

4. Encourage Repeating Positive Experiences

Once a fast and easy experience is provided, most customers will seek the same site again. Extended waiting times tend to frustrate customers and damage loyalty. Especially 79% of customers will not revisit a website that did not render well the first time they visited it.

5. Users Want Everything Delivered To Them Instantly

For every gain of 100ms in load time, large e-commerce sites register an increase in revenue from mobile users of 1 percent. While mobile shoppers are quite impatient, waiting is not something they are confident in. In simpler terms, if your site is taking too long to respond… they will jump to your competition.

Quick Pointers That Will Help Boost Your E-Commerce Speed

As you see, having a speedy website means that there will be more sales, improved SEO, and more satisfied customers. Here at Kozak Group, we assist companies in getting a frictionless performance. These are our seasoned recommendations for optimizing website speed with extra content that will enable you to implement changes.

Compress And Optimize Graphic Designs

For engaging users, images are a must but pictures that are not optimized are one of the biggest reasons for slow load time. Images of high resolution can substantially inflate the file size of a page, which then extends how long it takes to load.

Use Lazy Loading In Images 

Another technique for speeding up a webpage is lazy loading for images. To increase the speed at which the webpage loads, images should not be preloaded but instead, be set to come into view only when the user scrolls down to the section in which the image is placed. This way, resources will not be wasted on preloading the image and the page would be able to load faster.

In order to match the resolution of images on different devices, tools such as the Fairlead element can be utilized as a responsive design technique.

Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)  

A CDN like Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or Akamai grants a network of geographical servers the resource of images, videos, and scripts within its spread. Thus, the latency of the site is reduced as the information is retrieved from the server that has been physically closest to the user.

Minimizing the use of CSS and Javascript

CSS and Javascript block codes that inhibit the loading of the primary underlying contents of a website and further increase the load time of a website. Moreover, limiting the size of files by minification alongside deferring the loading time for non-essential elements and topics is quite effective. A general tip would include employing UglifyJS, CSSNano, or SlimTerser so that the CSS becomes and reads more smoothly by purging unwanted characters and comments.

Improve Server Response Times (TTFB) 

TTFB or Time to First Byte is an indicator that tells us how fast a server responds to the request made. If the response time of the server is inefficient, it may serve as a choke point and slow down the entire loading process. Consider switching to AWS, Google Cloud, and Kinsta which offer better servers with scalable infrastructure. You can also implement a reverse proxy server such as NGINX or Varnish to serve cached pages that are accessed regularly which will lessen the load on the server. Plus, refine the data on the left that contains the content needed to index, by adding frequently searched tables to the ranking service.

Set Up HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 Protocols

These protocols allow for the transfer and load of multiple files at the same time which reduces load time significantly. So, make the necessary changes to your web server so it is able to use the HTTPS protocols. LiteSpeed, Apache, and NGINX are a few servers that support this protocol.

Because HTTP 2 and 3 operate over a more secure connection, ensure an SSL certificate is used. And, to verify that the proper protocol for your website has been implemented, look into KeyCDN’s HTTP/2 Test.

Gzip or Brotli Compression Can be Enabled

Make changes to your server to allow for Gzip and Brotli markdown to enable compression of HTML, Java, and CSS files. In most cases, Brotli achieves greater compression than Gzip. Also, make the necessary edits to the server to aid you in serving pre-compressed files. Use of tools such as Check Gzip Compression to check the effectiveness of compression.

Ready to Grow? 

Kozak Group will convert these ideas into custom strategies that will efficiently work on your e-commerce. We will fasten the work of your site: if you think that only optimization is needed – we will carry out an update. We will do it seamlessly because having speed in e-commerce is not a bonus but the only advantage that is available. Get in touch with us.

Table of Contents

Let’s get in touch

In order to make sure your website is user friendly and optimized for Google’s algorithm, our on-site optimization experts clean up the code and copy.