The Need for Speed
Has this ever happened to you? You finally found the perfect gift for your hard-to-shop-for friend, added it to your cart, entered your payment information, then…. nothing. The page seems to have stalled in the middle of the purchase!
Online shoppers worldwide share that frustration. According to these stats from Radware.com:
- a mere 2-second delay during a transaction will increase abandonment rates to 87% (from the average of 70%)
- 46% of online shoppers said that checkout speed is the #1 determining factor about whether or not they will return to a site
The bottom line? Make sure your site is optimized for speed so your shoppers don’t experience this frustration!
Build a Fast Website
In these days of fast checkouts and changing minds, speed can make or break your e-commerce site. Frustrated shoppers don’t have the patience to wait for images to load or pricing to update. If your website isn’t fast, it’s probably losing business.
Does Your Site Have a Speed Problem?
Luckily, this is an area you can certainly improve before holiday shopping starts in earnest.
To find the bottlenecks in your e-commerce store, try one (or even all) of these free tools to test what’s holding up your pages:
- YSlow – YSlow is a web application that can be run through the browser of your choice. Once you’ve installed the bookmarklet or extension in your browser, you can run a page you’re on through the YSlow rules and it will score the page. It will then provide suggestions to improve the performance of that page.
- Pingdom – Testing your site’s speed with Pingdom is a snap. Simply enter your URL and hit “test now”. Pingdom will run the URL through a battery of tests and give you specific information about what on that page is slow, why, and how you can fix it.
- Google PageSpeed Insights – Simply put, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will analyze your site to provide “ways to make your site faster and more mobile-friendly.” As with Pingdom, you enter the URL you wish to test and hit “analyze”. Google will give you a report about what you can improve for faster performance.
Once you know what’s slowing your site down, you can take steps to fix it! If you’re comfortable doing the tweaks yourself, you can get started right away. If not, consult with a web professional to help you out.
Faster Page Speed Means Better Rankings
Google has made no secret of the fact that page speed is one of the factors taken into consideration with regards to search ranking. Bottom line, a faster site makes visitors happy, which, in turn, makes the search engines happy. Win-win!
