If you’ve ever shopped online, then you understand the frustration of a slow e-commerce website: it can take forever to load webpages and images, decreasing customer engagement – leading them straight to your competitors for their purchase. Speed kills in the world of e-commerce, so if you want increased sales and greater customer retention rates (go figure!), it’s time to start optimizing your eCommerce website performance.
Ready to find out how it’s done? Then you’ve come to the right place! In this blog post, we’ll cover some key tips to help turbocharge your eCommerce website performance.
Let’s dive in!
How does site performance affect eCom stores?
Skilled analyzed 12 case studies that revealed customer expectations of site performance:
- 79% of customers “dissatisfied” with a site’s performance are less likely to buy from them again
- 64% of smartphone users expect a website to load in four seconds or less
- 47% of online shoppers expect web pages to load in two seconds or less
Let’s take a closer look at why improving our eCommerce website performance should be a top priority!
Customer experience
Customer satisfaction is no longer a mere “nice-to-have”. With the right eCommerce experience, you can realize huge gains in customer loyalty, and reducing page load time from 10 seconds to 3 seconds could result in an incredible 26% boost of customers recommending your brand!
It’s all about speed: slowness means lost opportunities and frustrated visitors. Keep that user journey lightning fast if you want them to stay on board with your brand.
Average spending
Meeting customer needs quickly is essential for successful conversions. By increasing page-load speeds, you can give your customers a lightning-fast experience and propel them further down the conversion funnel – with an average 9% increase in spending as a bonus!
A lower bounce rate
When users leave your website without interacting with your eCommerce, the bounce rate is high. However, by improving the site by 0.1s, you can see how the bounce rate for the product listing page drops by nearly 6%. That is an insane correlation.
Besides, here are two big benefits of a Low Bounce Rate
- Lower bounce rate = Better engagement
- Lower bounce rate = positive SEO ranking signals
Pageviews/session, conversion rate, and average order value
A fractional improvement in website speed can make a world of difference for your eCommerce store. With just 0.1 upticks, the increase in page views per session and conversion rate could mean greater sales – not to mention an upgrade in average order value!
Optimizing speed has been proven time and again as essential for reaching success with eCommerce stores.
Keep your search visibility
Search engines use site speed as a ranking signal because it is directly related to user experience. A good eCommerce performance results in a higher engagement and conversion rate.
As users spend more time on your page, the overall dwell time increases. Google takes these metrics into account and rewards you with higher page rankings.
Your paid campaign makes sense
You can’t have a slow website and still top-load your ad on search engines, unlike in the past. To make paid campaigns effective today, you must meet the quality score metrics.
Google will likely assign a user experience rating to your eCommerce landing pages. Google will assign a high-quality score if it finds you relevant to the search term and experiences that match the intent as well as speed.
Another benefit of a high-quality score is that you pay less for clicks. So, if the quality score of your eCommerce page is high, you may end up paying less than your competitors.
Ways to improve your eCommerce website performance & page speeds
Keep the UX/ UI simple
UX (User experience) and UI (User Interface) are important things to attract and retain customers on your eCommerce site. You need to experience the website as a customer to their experience. How will they feel about the arrangement of the elements on the page, how easy it is for them to find their desired information and products, and whether are they motivated to buy the product or not?
And an important secret in this section is to keep it simple. The website needs to be simple enough so that customers don’t get overwhelmed.
Make sure the speed
During the campaign period, the page traffic will suddenly increase, causing the page speed to slow down. It will reduce the quality of the user experience and users will be able to leave the page quickly.
To overcome this situation, you should regularly check the page load quality of the website. There are many useful tools out there, and it is highly recommended the PageSpeed Insights page of Google. This tool will check and point out the errors you need to improve to enhance the speed of the page. You just need to fix all those errors.
Boost SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is an effective way to put your website in front of consumers. Be sure to incorporate related good volume keywords in your page titles, URLs, and alt-text to boost your SEO ranking on search engines.
And if you are looking for a creative way to improve your local SEO, consider using a product description generator app. With this type of app, you can create unique and professional product descriptions that boost sales. Also, make sure your product-focused keywords include verbiage to organically help rank your products on the search engine. By working on SEO, you can lead new customers to your website and make it easier for returning customers to find their way back.
Optimize the mobile version of your store
As e-commerce sites have all optimized phone purchases, customers’ phone buying behavior has also increased. Make sure your website design is responsive and update your mobile version.
To optimize your site for a seamless customer experience, consider:
- Minimizing pop-ups
- Ensuring your buttons are tap-friendly
- Displaying clear CTAs
- Employing responsive design
- Check your website loading speed
Optimize product discoverability
The product is the most important thing that you need to show your customers, so presenting your product stands out and excites customers.
You should put the product right after the brand introduction and present the products in groups or in a certain order. Don’t mess up. Let’s make discovering and learning about products easy and convenient to increase your purchasing behaviors.
Flexibility of your store with country-specific language and currency versions
This document or many others you refer to are in English. It may be appropriate in the English language or for many people familiar with the language.
Still, not all foreigners will be able to understand the intentions or jokes, or puns you put in English. So be flexible with the customer’s language and try to speak the same language as the customer.
You can add elements that are only available in the country or language of the customer, especially the unique elements of their culture and language. Thus, they feel closer, and trust, and therefore, increase the touch point with the brand.
Wrapping up
By following the best practices we discussed in this blog post, you should see a significant improvement in your website’s performance. But remember, the job is not done here. After improving your website’s performance, you need to continuously monitor it to ensure that these improvements are maintained over time.
Additionally, as new technology emerges and user expectations change, you will need to adapt your approach to ensure that your website continues to perform at its best. We hope this blog post has provided you with some useful insights into how you can improve your website’s performance.
Do you have any other tips or tricks for improving website performance? Share them with us in the comments below!
