Slow loading of site pages can destroy sales of your e-commerce site. Crashes can finish it.
You’ve probably already heard that if the site page loads for more than 5 (2, 3, 3.5, or whatever) seconds, the user will not wait and leave it in favor of the competitor. Usually, knowledge on this subject is limited by rumors based on some studies.
Let’s see what the reason is and how it works.
Survival of the fittest
Studies confirming the dependence of something on the speed of loading the site were actually conducted many times. Here is the data we have today:
Google: “If a site loads for more than three seconds, 53% of users will leave it.”
It is very important that your site loads quickly. Download speeds can be checked by special services like Test My Site.
SOASTA: “Every second of latency for a mobile page reduces conversion by 20%.”
According to the results of a joint study by the SOASTA analytical agency, conversion directly depends on how quickly the user has a targeted site. So, those pages that led to conversion were on average 26% faster than the rest. The agency concluded that the quick pages create the conditions for further actions: order, purchase, or call.
Google: “The mobile page, whose speed decreased from 1 to 10 seconds, the failure rate increased by 123%.”
It is also worth noting that the most noticeable gap in the conversion is observed in the range of 2-5 seconds when the conversion can drop by 9 times.
You can find many interesting research results on this topic here.
AKAMAI: A slow site can seriously affect the performance of an online store.
According to a study conducted by Akamai analysts, a delay of 100 milliseconds can reduce the level of desktop conversion by 2.4%, and mobile by 7.1%.
The slower the site loads, the worse it affects the conversion of the online store. It turned out that 1 second of delay reduces the conversion from desktops by 21.8%, from smartphones by 20.5%, and from tablets by 17.8%.
Why does e-commerce suffer the most from slow pages loading
Competition. The user can open a dozen sites and choose one that loads first.
The specifics of the behavior of potential customers. A person can wait a minute until his favorite Facebook or YouTube loads. But nobody wants to wait for the e-commerce site to load.
What affects site speed
Page rendering speed
Your site consists of content (content, information), images, scripts and other elements. When a person visits some page of the site, it is rendered in some way. This can happen quickly or slowly depending on the amount of content, on layout, the complexity of the site, the engine, hosting, and many other factors.
Content download speed
That is, how quickly this picture itself loads from your server to the user’s device. Of course, this depends on the Internet channel of the end-user, but also on the channel on which your server is running, your hosting, on its capabilities, tariffs, and everything else.
Server response rate
This the time until your site responded to anything to the user. That is the delay between the time when the user tried to open the page and when the first byte of this page began to load. During this time, a certain number of milliseconds passes.
Let’s talk about servers.
How does hosting determine the speed and reliability of the site connection
There are several major factors:
Hosting Hardware
The hardware and software components of the server must be of high quality, only in this case hosting will be able to provide the desired results.
If you want to keep your e-commerce website speedy and reliable, you need to pay attention to this hosting service – this one will not disappoint you in speaking of speed and reliability. Productive equipment will provide a high-speed response, fast loading pages with content of varying complexity. Especially in case of attacks, sharp increases in traffic.
Uptime
This parameter shows the percentage of uptime of the site of the total amount of time. If uptime is 95%, then 95 out of 100 minutes your site was available normally, and the remaining 5 minutes the site was down. The influence of this parameter is obvious, as the robot may not have time to index all pages, and site visitors will be dissatisfied with the sudden disconnection. Good hosting is one with 99.95% or more.
Geography
Let’s talk about hosting geography in more detail. It’s a luck if the user and site server are situated in the same region (eg, within New York). Since the Internet goes by wire, roughly speaking, you get pretty high speed. Well, the minimum delay. Some kind of page or site, or picture was requested – all this quickly passed to the device of our client, potential buyer.
If these two devices are in different countries (the matter is simple – remoteness), delays appear on different channels.
The first thing to consider is the physical location of the server (data center). As a rule, hosters explicitly indicate the country where their servers are located. Considerations for the geography of location are outlined above: the closer to the audience, the better.
CDN solves geography problem
Content Distribution Network or just CDN is a set of distributed servers located in different regional zones. They are scattered in different places, and synchronization takes place between them. That means just that your site is not situated on one server, but on 20, 30 or more.
- It solves both reliability and speed issues as
- CDN copies your site to many servers.
- The site is loaded from the server closest to each user.
- Static content (one that does not change) is cached for a long time.
- The load on the server is reduced.
How to accurately measure average page load time
Before you panic and go looking for a web developer who is optimizing your site, it’s important to understand what is causing him to work slowly.
Several free speed analysis tools help a lot in understanding what works and how.
There are slight differences in their measurement methods, so we recommend using each of them. And you can get started with this one.
Two major marketing mistakes
Studies that when it comes to speed and reliability, most marketers or owners simply do not seek improvement. Very often different specialists (developers, designers, content managers and administrators) shift responsibility for the site’s performance to each other, and the solution is delayed.
The second major problem is that marketers consider the increase in download speed a one-time procedure. At the same time, continuous improvement and development of the site mechanism are not taken into account. There are plenty of them: loading more and more voluminous uncompressed images, adding additional functions with slow Javascript, filling content with videos and animations.
So what to do?
- Check PageSpeed and Uptime.
- Use good hosting services.
- Keep track of the volume and quantity of content posted on the site should be constantly monitored.
- Monitor the page loading speed and bounce rate ratio.
- Transfer the site to CDN from a good hosting.
Don’t let the user become bored or even surprised by the crash, so they won’t leave you in favor of competitors.
On a related note, you may want to check out these eCommerce templates to build your online store.