When we talk about online sale, we need to understand that we are dealing with people who already do not have time to visit a physical store or who like me are lazy to flex their muscle :). If your e-commerce website is not saving these consumers their time or making them click on that refresh button again, they will move on to your competitor and maybe never visit you at all or worst share their bad experience with your e-commerce website with others.

In 1999, when the craze for high-speed internet connections was picking up the consumer were willing to wait for 8 seconds for a page to load. But now, a sluggish and unresponsive Ecommerce website is a major deterrent because the average online user will only tolerate load time of up to 3 seconds.

Image source: Radware.com

You might have the most attractive eCommerce website in the world but if it is not fast enough to open, it will not generate any sale. Users these days relate speed to efficiency, trust, and confidence. Having a blazing fast eCommerce website has many benefits.

1. Increases Sales and Conversions

The speed of an eCommerce website plays a vital role in its conversion rate. Making an appealing website or offering deals only work if the website fast enough to show them.  According to data in an Unbounce post,” there are more than $18 billion worth shopping carts abandoned a year for eCommerce websites, 18% of those abandoned carts are because of slow page-load time.”

Source: fastcompany.com

In The Minds Of Potential Buyers, A Slow Site Is A Non-Trusted Site!

Some Interesting Facts:

• Reducing page speed by 3 seconds increases revenue by 7-12%.
• An eCommerce website with page speed 3 seconds or more yields 22% fewer conversions than an eCommerce website that loads in one second.
• If an eCommerce website makes $100,000/day, a delay of 1 second in the page speed could possibly cost the e-commerce website owner $2.5 million in annual lost sales.
• Amazon’s calculated that a page speed slowdown of just one second could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.
• Google calculated that if it slows down its search results by just four tenths of a second they might lose 8 million searches per day.

2. Satisfies Online Shoppers

No one likes to wait these days. The average online user is extremely impatient, they like real time experience. An eCommerce website that opens up in less than 3 seconds not only impresses the visitor but also influences his or her purchasing behavior and decision-making process.

A Happy Customer Is Your Best Salesman!

Online recommendation and reviews play an important part in the growth of an e-commerce business. According to Nielsen research, 92% of people trust word-of-mouth or suggestion from their known more than any other forms of marketing. With that said the last thing any eCommerce owner would want is shoppers talking about the slow and unresponsive online shopping experience they had with them.

3. Improves SEO Rankings

eCommerce heavily depends on search engine ranking for sales. One of the parameters which search engines rank a website is User Experience and the users are only happy if they get the desired thing fast.  A fast loading web page will always give that WOW feeling to the visitor. That is why google considers Page Speed one of its ranking signals.

An official statement from the Google blog:

This means that if your pages are slow, you will have to face a revenue loss because of lower organic rank. Besides good user experience, fast page speeds definitely make an eCommerce website SEO friendly. As per a reputed SEO blog, the Strange Loop Data show that 1-second delay in page load time can generate a 7% loss in conversions.

Few things that can speed up Page Speed of Your eCommerce Website

If your website is taking time to load, consider analyzing your website through Google Page Speed tool. This will help you understand what is taking the most time so that you can clean up the problematic HTML, CSS and Javascript code. Given below are some best practices:

1. Use Dedicated or Fast Web server:

The most important thing that affects the performance of your website page speed is the Web hosting. One can improve the performance of his or her eCommerce website by opting for a Dedicated or Fast Website server. Even though it may cost you more, but being on a slow server can cost you even more in sales long term.

2. Use Fast Search Server: 

A homepage cannot display all the products being sold, thus the “Search” option is the next thing you must focus on. Ensure the Search Server associated with your eCommerce websites is top notch. The faster and the more accurate result your Search Server gives the better customer experience you generate. A slow search server is related to a slow website. Ineffective Search Server ensures that you don’t last long in the e-commerce business so choose wisely.

3. Use a CDN (content delivery network):- 

CDN is a company that has a large number of servers placed in several places to deliver web pages to visitors. If your website has large amounts of display content, prefer using a content delivery network (CDN). The main issue a CDN address is latency or the amount of time it takes to deliver web pages to the user.

4. Use CSS Sprites:

CSS Sprites is a technology to transform multiple images into one big image. This will reduce the number of concurrent connections and your website will load faster.

5. Use Caching System:

By caching your web pages, you can make your website faster. The request will be served directly from an earlier saved page on your web host. This reduces the server load and serves up your website’s pages instantly.

6. Compress the Image Sizes:

Compressing images and text improve websites performance and speed up page load time. Compression reduces the data transfer load on the server. Some hosting providers by default compress websites. You can use tools like Google Page Speed that can let you know if your website needs compression. If your images need compression, you can use a tool like Smush.it to compress them.

Summary

The Faster The Better!

A fast website definitely gives a WOW feeling even if gives you what you want or not, the biggest examples are Google and Amazon one just comes back for more. Even though a customer may not buy on your eCommerce portal for the first time but the super-fast experience he/she gets will make you are on their fingers when they go shopping online.

An eCommerce website that provides customer experience is more likely to sustain competitive advantages. From satisfying buyers to accomplishing higher search engine rankings, the importance of website speed must not be ignored and continually accelerated when possible.

Source: testinsane.com