How Site Speed Impacts Conversion Rate of Ecommerce Website

Does site speed impact conversion rate of eCommerce websites?

Absolutely Yes, studies have found that the longer your site takes to load, the fewer conversions you’ll get for your website.

Whether you’re a business that is looking to increase subscribers or sell products online, site load time is significant for user experience conversions.

Does a slower website mean lost conversions?

Continue reading to find the answer.

What Is a Website Conversion Rate?

A conversion rate is a percentage of users who take the desired action. It means the user converts when they decide to purchase a product and click on the “buy” button.

Depending on what your focus is, it can be a little different for every site.

• For some websites, conversion means getting a direct sale.
• For others, it means signing up for their newsletter.
• For many, it is all about getting the visitor to complete a task.

If an e-Commerce website receives 200 visitors monthly and has 50 sales, the conversion rate would be 50 divided by 200, or 25%.

Click to learn the E-Commerce CRO: Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

How the site speed impacts the conversion rate of an Ecommerce website

Site speed represents how your website is performing overall. It is scored by services like Google PageSpeed Insights that look at various load times on your site in aggregate.

 It is the speed of your website that determines whether or not the shopper will buy, browse, or bounce. It affects user engagement and user experience.

Skilled.co has revealed customer expectations from site performance:

• More than 60% of smartphone users want a website to load in three seconds or less
• More than 75% of customers “not satisfied” with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from them again.
• More than 45% of online buyers expect web pages to load in two seconds or less.

So, if your eCommerce website is slow, you’re likely to lose a major chunk of potential customers, and thereby conversions.

• Site Speed Impacts SEO: SEO aims at making a site accessible to Google for the purposes of improved rankings, increased traffic, better user experience, and higher conversions. And site speed plays a significant role in successful eCommerce SEO. It helps in maximizing the web traffic to a site, and the better the quality of traffic, the higher the conversions.

That’s why every SEO company providing search engine optimization services is focused on improving site load speed. It is one of the key deciding factors for Google’s algorithm. It ensures a good user experience and lets Google rank those sites. If the site is slow, it can negatively impact bounce rate and session time, which is not good for SEO.

• Site Speed Impacts Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is generally a percentage of visitors that leaves your website after only viewing one webpage. Do you know an increased bounce rate is bad for eCommerce SEO and negatively affects conversions?

More surprisingly, it is directly affected by your website speed. The slow speed irritates visitors and provokes them to leave the site. The longer your website takes to load, the more likely visitors will exit from it, which causes an increased bounce rate. Higher bounce rates mean poor conversion.

• Site Speed Impacts User Experience: One of the core objectives of an SEO service provider is improving user experience as it improves usability, boosts traffic, and directly affects your SEO rankings through the several user-engagement metrics that Google employs in its search algorithms.

Click to learn Why UX Design is Important for Ecommerce SEO?

But, how fast your website loads has a crucial impact on user experience. Referring to the stats we have mentioned above, users expect a website to load in less than 3 seconds. Just a 1-second delay and they leave your website. So, there is very little chance of conversions.

• Site Speed Impacts Web Traffic: Neither people nor search engines prefer websites with slow-loading pages. Google penalizes a site that loads slowly. It won’t be able to determine which pages show up where on the SERP.

A study by Backlinko has revealed that “pages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher than pages on slow-loading sites. If the site is slow, the traffic will decline. And because a good conversion rate depends majorly on website traffic, it is good to improve the site speed and increase traffic.

How to Improve Your Website Speed?

With the above information, it is clear that site speed has a great role in conversion rates. So, make sure your eCommerce website loads fast to improve conversions. Here’s how you can improve the website speed.

• Minimize HTTP requests
• Minify and combine files
• Defer JavaScript loading
• Reduce server response time
• Enable browser caching
• Reduce redirects
• Compress and optimize your images
• Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution.
• Cache your web pages
• Enable browser caching
• Eliminate unnecessary plugins.

Click here to learn the Techniques That Improve the Page Load Speed of Your Website

Conclusion

Slow sites kill conversions and can never recover. Your competitors are just one Google search away, and shoppers don’t hesitate to look elsewhere for the products they need.

Better yet, keep your website optimized by reducing the number of plugins, minimizing the number of JavaScript and CSS files, implementing Gzip Compression, reducing redirects, optimizing the size of images on your website, and minifying and combining files.

The post How Site Speed Impacts Conversion Rate of Ecommerce Website first appeared on KnowledgeCenter.