eCommerce Website Speed

Posted on August 1, 2018 (July 21, 2021) by Bob Ottaway

eCommerce Website Speed and its Effect on Your Business’ Bottom Line

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We’ve all heard the saying “slow and steady wins the race” but in the case of eCommerce website speed, this does not apply. Rather, faster is better. A Google study has shown that on average, when load time increases from 1 to 5 seconds, the probability of visitors bouncing from the site increases 90%. It’s a scary thought that only 4 mere seconds can drop the majority of your visitors like flies.

It’s no surprise that people want, even expect, to get information quicker and quicker nowadays. The average online user will only lend 2 seconds of their day to wait for your eCommerce website to load. Any longer and you just lost a customer. If the website speed of your eCommerce website isn’t fully optimized or on par with your competitors, you’re looking at a huge loss of business.

This loss is illustrated by the shocking results from a study Amazon conducted on what would happen if their load time slowed down. Amazon found that slowing down their website speed by only 1 second could cost them $1.6 billion each year! It’s an eye-opening statistic and one that should push you to assess your eCommerce website speed situation and ensure that it’s not causing revenue loss.

Optimize Website Speed for Rank

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So far, we know that slow website speed directly impacts the user’s experience and their likeliness to abandon your site. What you may not know is that this can then snowball into even more negative effects on your Google ranking. Speed is among Google’s top ranking factors and they are not discreet about this fact. Google strives to gives users the best experience and will award fast-performing websites with a boost in ranking. Even more, a slower website speed results in less of your website’s pages being crawled meaning chunks of your site are essentially being hidden from Google.

To optimize your eCommerce website speed, implement the following or talk to your web developer at detroitwebdesign.com, ambrdetroit.com or brownboxbranding.com about getting these in place:

Optimize product images by ensuring they are compressed and in the correct file format
Install a reliable caching plugin for regular website caching
Use a content distribution network (CDN) to deliver content faster to users in various geographic locations
Minimize redirects
Optimize and minify the website code by removing any unnecessary spaces, characters, line breaks and indentations)
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript

Just this past month, Google rolled out their “Speed Update” which focuses page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches, where in the past it was mainly focused on desktop searches. This means, optimizing your eCommerce website for mobile is equally as, if not more, important as it is for desktop.