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E-Commerce and Web Performance

Gopal Masilamani
April 22, 2014 |

Performance and speed are the buzz words for any e-commerce website. There is an intimacy between performance and dollar revenue generated through online e-commerce web-stores.  If your e-commerce website performance is robust and loads faster, you have a higher conversation rate than a non-performing slow e-commerce website. On the other hand, if the performance is substandard, shoppers become distracted and leave to their competitor’s website. Also, the page load time is one factor which could affect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ranking.

Performance

Why second(s) matter for your growth and conversion rate?

  1. Every 1 second of improvement provides a 2% increase in conversions – Based on the performance analysis done on Walmart.com- http://minus.com/msM8y8nyh#2e
  2. Firefox reduced the average load time by 2.2 seconds and increased the downloads by 15.4% – http://mzl.la/1aRTugJ
  3. Every 1 second delay in page load can cause a 7% loss in customer conversions – by TagMan- http://bit.ly/1e6iJiA
  4. The conversion rate suffered a -3.5% hit when the site was delayed just 1 second – Web Performance Today – http://bit.ly/1jRXPZ0
  5. Research’s found that 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site – http://bit.ly/1kX3mQF

How much speed is the good speed?

If you can have your e-commerce website respond within 1-2 seconds, there is a higher probability that, you will have more visitors and increased conversion rate. According to a study conducted by TagMan in partnership with UK’s leading glasses e-tailor Glasses Direct, the conversion rate peaked at about two seconds, thus dropping by 6.7% for each additional second.

Chart

As a web administrator you should have an adequate understanding of the current e-commerce web trends, as well as; target consumers, the geographical location of your targeted consumers, peak sales period, sales trends, and your consumers choice of devices/browsers.  All these factors play important roles on your “good speed”. Your e-commerce website should have been designed, built and maintained to increase the conversion rate of your target consumers meanwhile attracting new consumers.

Most importantly, periodic measurements of your web speed and tweaks play important roles in maintaining your sales performance as well as satisfied consumers.

How should I measure my e-commerce website performance?

There are a variety of tools available online to measure your e-commerce website performance. However, I would say, the best tool is your personal experience. Navigate on your e-commerce website; perform searches, compare products, add products to your cart, remove products from your cart, edit your cart, ship, pay, review your order and place an order. All throughout these steps use the timer to measure the second(s) it takes for your web page to respond to each action. If your response time is within 1-2 seconds, most likely, your e-commerce store performance is on par with industry performance standards.

Sucess

This approach is helpful when your e-commerce website is hosted by a hosting provider. However, if your e-commerce website is hosted in your office, the proximity to your server may result in a difference in performance between you and someone accessing your e-commerce website from a different destination.

Below are a few websites that can be used to measure the performance of your website geographically. These websites provide you with an option to choose the location, browser, connection speed, number of tests to be performed, etc. Also, they provide actionable recommendations to fix the performance issues.

http://www.gtmetrix.com/

http://www.webpagetest.org/

http://www.webwait.com/

Also, Google provides you with a variety of  tools and suggestions in order to properly analyze and optimize your web performance.

https://developers.google.com/speed/

Where should I start first?

Understand – This is the first step in this whole performance improvement process. Understand the browsing trend and geographical location of your target users.

  • Which browser used most often to access your website?
  • What kind of device is used most often by your consumers?
  • Do you have more visitors during weekdays or weekends?
  • Is there any particular time of the day, you have larger sales trends?
  • What is geographic area of most of your sales, fewer sales, or no sales whatsoever?

Measure – Assess your website performance from the above URL’s and understand where you stand.

Tune & Optimize – Analyze the results of your performance measures and take steps to fix the identified issues in order to improve the performance of your e-commerce website.

DCKAP has extensive experience in this type of e-commerce and Magento performance improvement. We have experienced developers whose primary focus is performance and consumer satisfaction. We have performed Magento e-commerce website development, maintenance and performance tuning to key magento e-commerce websites (featured on Magento.com) and kept them on top of their sales performance capabilities.

Please read our case studies to know more about our work.

Gopal Masilamani

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