This is part 2 of 3 part series of articles about how site speed can affect conversion rates, search traffic, and mobile experiences for eCommerce sites, and what you and your developer can do about it.
If you missed part 1 – it’s here: Why eCommerce owners should care about site speed
Actually this depends on a number of different factors including:
Why? Because different markets have different tolerances to site speed. Even in one market, there will be big differences between segments. In fashion retail, visitors to a unique boutique may be OK waiting for high quality images of beautiful people and products to load. But what about visitors to a fashion retailer selling multiple brands? How long would you wait on ASOS for a page to load to buy Nike trainers, when you know you can get them at The Iconic or Nike Store, in 2 clicks?
I’m assuming you have developer/maintenance person you are going to talk to about speed issues. So the point of benchmarking is to empower you to have sensible discussions with them about how the site is performing. Different tools test different aspects of the your online store page load (server, front-end etc). You don’t need to understand these too much – your developer will be able to dig in further. These are the leading tools:
For testing real experiences that may impact the return on investment on your Paid Search, I suggest you first do a Google search for an exact product your online shop sells, so you can test the relative experience of a visitor with intent to purchase. For example we searched for AirMax shoes (see above) and then picked two eCommerce product pages to compare.
I suggest you create a table like this and share it with your developer:
Site | Page Speed (Desktop) | PageSpeed (Mobile) | GTMetrix | WebPage Test.org | Pingdom |
ASOS.com.au https://www.asos.com/au/nike/nike-air-max-90-essential-sneakers-in-black/prd/7704704 | 64/100 | 52/100 | Fully loaded 17.1 sec (Can)
Page size 1.83mb
236 requests | 12.45 sec (doc loaded) | 3.07 sec (Melb) Page size 1.7mb
238 requests |
Nike Official https://store.nike.com/au/en_gb/pd/air-max-90-essential-shoe/pid-10064377/pgid-11100949 | 71/100 | 64/100 | Fully loaded 14.2 sec (Can)
Page size 1.51Mb
149 requests | Blocked (doc loaded) | 5.5 sec (Melb) Page size 1.4mb
154 requests |
Once you embark on improving your eCommerce Store performance, you can use more accurate tools to test your improvements, but also to assist with analysis of where problems might lie. Real User Monitoring is an approach to web monitoring that analyses all (or a sample) of visits to your website, and requires installing some code on your site.
One of the key tools you probably already have at your disposal is Google Analytics. I’ll talk more about how you can use Google Analytics to help diagnose speed problems that may be impacting your sales, in the 3rd article in this series.
In the next article I’ll provide we’ll look at specific action you can take to improve your website performance to get higher conversions.