Site Performance (or lack thereof) is one of the biggest pain points eCommerce businesses face today, due in part to its direct correlation to conversion rate. If you don’t think site performance matters to your customer - your revenue, and your reputation, are at risk.

I’ll cover why site performance matters and how best to improve it if you find yourself on the slower end of the speed trial.

Consider this:

• It takes about fifty milliseconds, or .05 seconds, for users to form an opinion about your site and determine if they will stay or go. Think about your personal experience with a slower-paced load time on a site. How many times have you bounced off as quickly as you found it? From ordering a pizza to buying a couch, today’s consumer simply does not have time to wait.  
• Fifty-seven percent  of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed web application on mobile.

Given the miniscule timeframe to make a good first impression on a consumer, plus the hefty influence of word-of-mouth first impressions by those same consumers (either favorable or less than), site performance is not a “nice to have,” it is critical.

Poor site performance is expensive. Industries may vary as far as numbers, but let’s see on average what the damage looks like when it comes to what slow site speed will cost you. For example, if you’re running an ecommerce site that makes $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could  cost you $2.5 million  per year in lost sales. To put that in eCommerce behemoth terms, let’s take Amazon. Performance tests showed they would lose $1.6 BILLION every year if they slowed down by just one second.

What is the Benchmark for Optimal Site Speed?

The Google-recommended page load time is under  two seconds. Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability, while Google aims to keep load time under a half-second. Additional food for thought: 47% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds are less, while studies show for every 100ms decrease in home page load speed results in a 1.11% lift in session-based conversion.

Other factors that affect site performance to keep in mind: mobile device usage, bandwidth, and variable internet speeds by user region.

So now that you’re aware of the high stakes of slow site speed, the good news is you have options for improving it. First things first, always be testing.

Web Application Performance & Speed Testing Tools

There are many products and services in the market to diagnose Web Application speed and performance. It’s important to have a clear picture of how your site is performing and be able to make tweaks quickly and easily. More benefits to these tools include:

• Find out how your site is performing across devices. Most users are visiting through a mobile device so optimization is key
• See how your site is performing across regions and countries
• Analyze and optimize for better rankings and UX
• Triage bottlenecks and make optimization decisions based on ROI and conversion rates

Interested in Learning More About Elastic Path Commerce Cloud?

Launch and optimize innovative experiences fast, with a modern, headless, SaaS, API-first, & microservices-based commerce platform.

The Top Web Performance/Speed Testing Tools:

Pingdom Speed Test

GTmetrix

Google PageSpeed Insights

Yellow Lab Tools

WebPage Test

KeyCDN Website Testing Tools

DotCom-Monitor

Dareboost

IsItWP Website Speed Tool

GiftOfSpeed