12.09.19
5 Min read
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In this article we’ll discuss how to increase your ecommerce website speed and conversions. It’s important to understand what elements influence the purchase decision so you can efficiently optimize your ecommerce website and boost conversion rates, and ultimately, sales.
The conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action. The archetypical example of conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who buy something on the site.
Example: An ecommerce site is visited by 100,000 people during the month of April. During that month, 2,000 users purchased something from the site. Thus, the site’s conversion rate is 2,000/100,000 = 2%.
Conversion rates are always almost the same (2-3%) across most of the eCommerce sites below top 1000. Experts suggest that low conversion in general is due to the complexity of converting a viewer to a customer. Recent trends show that it’s getting harder to improve the conversion rates due to the situation of the web industry, given all the complexities of conversion decision, funnels, buyers stage, infrastructure and so on.
Here are some facts:
The majority of businesses fail to create an efficient conversion rate optimization strategy. A website only has a 5-10 second window to make a good impression and start the dialogue between the product and the customer.
A site needs an effective system that enables marketers to make fast changes on the landing (and all other) pages, while securing the user experience at a highest level. Website performance is a key component (we’ll describe it in detail in the following chapters) to boost your conversions.
Web performance optimization is usually a “black box” for everyone outside IT departments. It means equipping your website with whatever gets it to load faster. Ideal time is less than 2 seconds, but many top brands keep losing customers, or customer interest due to bad performance, frequent downtimes, and overall lack of understanding of the web performance best practices.
If a website fails to make a good first impression, the user will leave in the first 15 seconds of landing on the site. Simple, isn’t it? Online store development goes into building the store, but despite the flawless design and efficiency of the programming code, the focus on creating a mind grabbing optimal user experience is needed.
In ecommerce, the number of sales is directly connected to the speed at which website content is being delivered.
Akamai, currently the world’s largest CDN services provider, ran a research in 2017 that went on to show that:
Performance has a direct impact on your website revenue, metrics influence brand perception, loyalty and visitor engagement.
Non-technical
These are the non-technical elements:
Non-technical elements are those focused mostly on the actual marketing and sales process, user design and consumer psychology. They are crucial in the selling process. However, without properly implemented technical elements your conversion rates will also suffer.
Technical
The key technical element to consider is website speed.
Page speed measures the time it takes the content on a URL to load. Site speed, on the other hand, represents how your site is performing overall. It’s scored by services like Google PageSpeed Insights which look at various load times on your site in aggregate.
Both paid and organic search engine channels will also penalize a slow loading site.
With paid search, slow landing pages lower your Google AdWords Quality Score—which means a higher cost-per-click.
Search engine optimization (SEO) experts will also tell you that slow pages hurt organic rankings. Google made it official in their latest “Speed Update.” As of July 2018, page speed is now a ranking factor for mobile searches, too.
There are several ways to increase your website speed:
Improve ecommerce conversion rates takes time and effort. We have looked at some ways you can increase your website’s speed to improve conversions. In the next article, we’ll take a deeper look at key performance metrics that influence conversions, and how you can optimize those metrics to further boost conversions and revenue.
If you have any questions, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.
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