I’m embarrassed to say - I’m guilty of intending to buy an item from a brand I trust, yet ultimately buying that item from Amazon. It’s not that I dislike Amazon. It’s just that I really would rather not give them ALL of my money.
Here’s what happens - I’ve got 10 minutes to buy that pair of sneakers I need for my son. I go to the brand’s website on my phone and start searching for the sneakers. I filter for size and brand. And then…. I wait…. It might only be a few seconds per page, but the seconds turn into minutes wasted.
In order for me to buy 1 pair of sneakers, I’ve got to click through several pages to get to the sneakers I want, then pick the size and color, then add to cart, then checkout. After 5 minutes of waiting for page after page to load, I bail. I go to the Amazon app on my phone and buy the sneakers in 2 minutes.
Not only did I buy the sneakers from Amazon instead of the brand I intended, I also had a bad shopping experience with that brand.
Failing to convert customers is an ongoing risk for e-commerce businesses
With rising concerns of a pending recession, it’s critically important to ensure customer conversions are maximized today. There are two obvious ways to increase customer conversions:
- increase the number of eyeballs on your site, and/or
- increase the number of eyeballs that convert to customers
The good news is - there are steps businesses can take today to increase customer conversions and revenue without having to drive more eyeballs to your site.
Improve web performance optimization to increase conversions and drive up revenue
Improving site speed is one of the most powerful things you can do to help both your customers and your business. Customers have a better shopping experience and businesses are rewarded with higher conversions.
It doesn’t take moving mountains to achieve outcomes. Deloitte proved this in their study 'Milliseconds Make Millions' - which linked a 0.1 second speed performance with a 8.4% increase in conversions and a 9.2% increase in order value - which is massive.
Learn how performance improvements can turn into additional conversions and revenue for your company.
Now that you have a ballpark sense of what’s to gain, let’s dig into the how so you can start making progress towards increased conversions.
Here’s how:
Step 1: Get a High-Level Read On Your Site’s Performance
There are several tools out there for quickly auditing web performance. PageSpeed Insights is easy to use - Run your reports and review the outputs.
Note: On e-commerce and travel sites, it’s likely that your home page is performing better than pages further in your purchase funnel due to the complexity introduced further on, so make sure you audit several pages into your purchase funnel.
Step 2: Leverage or Set Up Real User Monitoring to Track Progress
What gets measured gets managed. So, after running your audit, ensure your tech org is gathering Real User Monitoring (RUM) metrics so that you can monitor your progress (and regressions) over time. DataDog, New Relic, and Speedcurve are all excellent RUM tools, and there’s a good chance. your tech teams may already have RUM dashboards in place.
Step 3: Prioritize High ROI Changes with the Highest ROI in Your Funnel
If RUM metrics confirm that your site’s performance needs improvement, identify the largest constraints in your purchasing funnel, and have your teams estimate the complexity of addressing those constraints.
One big mistake teams make is focusing on areas that don’t drive the biggest ROI potential. For example, if you improve caching of images, this only impacts repeat customers because first time customers aren’t hitting the cache.
Step 4: Fully dedicate a team to improving performance optimization
We all know how hard it is to balance feature development with other types of technical work. So, if you really want to optimize performance of your site, ensure the team working on this important work is fully dedicated and has a chunk of time carved out to work on this without getting pulled off to do feature work.
Step 5: Measure performance on an ongoing basis
Optimizing your performance doesn’t end after you find a dedicated team. It’s a good idea to implement tools to measure your performance on an ongoing basis and also incorporate performance into your CD/CI pipeline.
Have questions about how to get started? Reach out today for a free performance optimization assessment.
Debbie Madden
