OPTIMIZATION
Get Your Site Performance in Order:
A Critical SEO Must-Do for
eCommerce Success
OPTIMIZATION
Get Your Site Performance in Order:
A Critical SEO Must-Do for eCommerce Success
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital commerce, understanding what might be hurting your website and broader online presence has never been more important. Site performance is a crucial element that often gets overlooked but plays a significant role in user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).
At PeakActivity, we understand the importance of a well-optimized, high-performing website and what it means for achieving eCommerce success. Here’s why site performance matters and how you can ensure your site is running at its best.
The Importance of Site Performance
Major search engines including Google and Bing have repeatedly emphasized that site performance is a ranking factor in their respective search engine algorithms. Why? Because they want to direct users to websites that not only provide valuable content that provides the solution they’re searching for be that a product, service, or answer to a question, but that also offer a seamless and fast user experience along the way. This is where site performance comes into play. A website that isn’t super-fast can negatively impact user experience which can ultimately negatively impact your search engine rankings, reducing your visibility and organic traffic.
User Sensitivity to Page Load Time
Stepping beyond search engines for a moment, the reality is that user expectations for modern websites and their experiences on them – especially for performance – are higher than ever. According to research, nearly 75% of online shoppers say that page speed influences their willingness to purchase from a retailer. If your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, you could see your conversion rates drop by as much as 50%. For eCommerce businesses, conversion rates decrease by an average of 0.3% for each additional second a website takes to load after the initial 2 seconds. These statistics highlight the direct impact of site performance on your bottom line.
With a lightning-fast load time of just 1 second, conversion rates soar to nearly 40%. However, even a slight delay to 2 seconds sees this drop to 34%. As load time stretches to 3 seconds, the conversion rate settles at 29%, eventually hitting rock bottom at a 6-second delay.
If the highest conversion rates for eCommerce sites come when a site can load its pages consistently within 1-2 seconds of a user click, performance becomes a matter of dollars and sense. But gaining speed isn’t just a matter of flicking a switch; there is almost always a no.
Balancing Features and Performance
The modern internet experience is one that expects a heavy presence of images, video, and animated effects present on your website. However, it’s important to remember that though these features are often non-negotiable, each of those features comes at a performance cost which can become quite expensive in the aggregate. As such, achieving optimal site performance often involves striking a balance between the functionality and features your users love and the resources required to deliver them. While not all sites can achieve a perfect performance score due to their complexity and the need for certain features (some of the biggest, most visited websites on the internet receive failing performance grades), there are always areas where improvements can be made.
VALUED SEO CLIENTS
Practical Tips for Improving Site Performance
In light of all this, what is the right way to start understanding and improving site performance? Here are a few things we like to do for our clients which we’ve found to be fairly universal needs:
Optimize Images
Large images can significantly slow down your site. Ensure that all images are compressed and properly formatted without compromising on quality. Free tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptimizer can help with this if you don’t have access to another bulk compression option or are uncomfortable using something like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp.
Even better: convert your images to a modern image format like WebP which can provide equivalent image quality at as a given JPG or PNG but significantly smaller file sizes. Better still: also host your images on a super-fast CDN and alleviate that performance burden from your server entirely.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Minimize the number of elements on your page that require HTTP requests, such as images, scripts, and CSS files. Combining files and using CSS sprites can reduce load times.
Leverage Caching and Compression
Set up browser caching on the client side so that returning visitors don’t have to reload the entire page. Combine this with site compression on the server side, which can reduce bandwidth needs by as much as 90% and load times by 10-20%. Combined, these can significantly speed up the user experience for both first time and repeat visitors. Not sure if your website is using compression? Use this GZIP compression testing tool to check.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
As mentioned earlier, CDNs can distribute your content across multiple servers worldwide, limiting the burden on your servers, and reducing the distance data needs to travel and speeding up load times for users regardless of their location. Most CDNs are paid services, but their benefits typically outweigh the investment, especially for medium or large eCommerce sites. Cloudflare is our favorite and most used, but several great options are out there, including options from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and several others.
Review & Optimize JavaScript and CSS
A review of the JS and CSS currently loading on your website is recommended.
Look for opportunities to unload JS and CSS that are not being used anymore (or that are not being used on certain types of pages).
For the JS and CSS that remains, look for opportunities to minify these files to reduce their size and improve load times.
Look for opportunities to defer or asynchronously load these scripts so that they do not block the rendering process for the rest of the page.
Consider alternatives to the current JS implementation. Is there a more modern or efficient script or plugin that you can use to get the same effect at a lower overhead?
If you’re running on a modern CMS platform like Wordpress or Shopify, plugins may help address this need quickly. That said, we encourage you to leave the testing and validation of any JS and CSS optimizations to your developers. In our experience, minifying, deferring, and/or async loading scripts and CSS can sometimes cause features to break or layouts to do strange things. Test in your development environment to ensure there are no bugs being created before putting these changes into production.
Tools to Evaluate and Improve Site Performance
If you’re unsure how your site is currently performing or where improvements can be made, we recommend tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console’s Page Experience and Core Web Vitals. These tools are designed to help site owners and developers identify and address performance issues that may be affecting their site's speed and overall user experience. They are invaluable tools in the overall process of making real gains in site performance.
Google PageSpeed Insights
A staple for nearly 15 years, Google PageSpeed is an online tool that provides detailed insights into your site's performance on both desktop and mobile devices. It analyzes any page on your website you give it and offers detailed suggestions for helping you make material improvements to a variety of aspects of your site, from identifying unoptimized images to reducing or deferring javascripts. These tips can become a cheat sheet for addressing exactly what Google wants to see in performance from a good website. And any improvements benefit your users the most.
Google Search Console
Within Google Search Console, the Page Experience and Core Web Vitals reports offer a deeper dive into your site's performance metrics. Where PageSpeed dives deep into the individual page you give it to look at, Core Web Vitals monitors and reports on key aspects of user experience, such as loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability across your entire site. By tag-teaming with your developer team to address any issues highlighted in these reports, you can make significant strides in improving your site’s performance.
For great tools outside of the Google ecosystem, we also like to use GTmetrix and Pingdom. We like to use all of these to validate issues really are issues and that fixes really are working. We can’t recommend these enough, but don’t feel limited to just these. There are quite a few tools out there; these are just the ones we have the experience with to vouch for.
Give Your Customers the Performance They Expect
At PeakActivity, we know that optimizing site performance is a fundamental aspect of eCommerce success. By ensuring your website is fast and efficient, you not only improve your search engine rankings but also enhance the user experience, putting you on a path towards higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Remember, while it may be challenging to eliminate every performance bottleneck, incremental improvements can make a significant difference. Whether it’s optimizing images or leveraging the latest in AI and emerging technologies, every effort counts. Prioritize site performance as part of your overall SEO strategy, and watch your eCommerce business thrive.
If your business needs a hand in auditing your site performance, finding the opportunities for improvement that your eCommerce site needs, and getting them implemented, we can help. Our SEO experts have been successfully piloting businesses towards performance and ranking improvements for many of the brands that work with us and we can do the same for you. Give us a call.
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