Written by Giles Bennett
Many studies have been carried out looking at the effects of slow page load times on conversion rates and the universally accepted truth is that if your site doesn’t load fast, your customers will probably walk away. To quote one such study, carried out by Gomez (part of Compuware) in 2010 entitled Why Web Performance Matters?, users expect a site to load in under 2 seconds and rather worryingly 40% will abandon shopping altogether if the response time is greater than 3 seconds.
One thing that is often overlooked is that for a successful e-commerce site to work, it’s not just how quickly the home page loads, but how the user feels about the entire visit. Imagine your shop is a supermarket and all your trolleys have squeaky, wobbly wheels, shoppers will soon get annoyed and go elsewhere. You may be proud of your Magento site’s home page with its sub one second load time, but if the whole shopping experience is a slow and clanky process, shoppers may abandon their shopping and worse still, never return.
How To Speed Up Magento
At HummingbirdUK we have extensive experience of optimizing e-commerce sites and whether you want your existing site given a health check or want a complete site design, we always ensure that page load times and optimization are a priority.
Remember Web Performance Optimization (WPO) also aids Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as Google’s algorithms also take site speed into account when crawling. So it’s not only your shoppers who will be happy, but also Google’s crawlbots.
If you want to discuss your e-commerce WPO requirements with us, please get in touch.
