Is Site Speed Killing Your Conversion Rate?

Don’t you hate it when it takes a site forever to load? Your customers do too. In fact, they hate it so much that even a few seconds of lag can mean a big drop in sales.

Yeah - it’s that important. So how can you make sure that your store is loading quickly enough to optimize your conversions?

What is Site Speed?

Exactly what it sounds like. Site speed is the speed that your site loads. Page speed refers to how quickly each individual page loads.

Quick Facts

• The highest conversion rates happen when a page takes 1-2 seconds to load. Every additional second it takes to load leads to an average .3% decrease in conversions.

• The longer it takes for your site to load, the higher the bounce rate.

• One study showed that a 1 second page delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.

• The same study showed that 46% of visitors won’t return to a poor performing website, and that 1 in 4 (25%!) of visitors will abandon a site that takes more than 4 seconds to load.

What You Can Do To Optimize Your Site Speed

There’s a lot at stake if your site speed is lacking. On the plus side, there is a lot that can be done to make sure your speed is optimal.

Fyresite Forward Tips for Optimizing Site Speed

• Compress videos and images

  • Videos and images are beautiful, but they can take a lot of load time. If you want your site to load quickly without sacrificing the quality of your videos, it’s time to compress.

  • Fyresite’s favorite tool for compression - Handbrake

• Choose fonts wisely

  • Yes, even your fonts impact loading times. When you opt to use special fonts, it has to be downloaded to the visiting computer before the site will load.

• Optimize features

  • By adding a tool like a heat map to your website, you can see which features users like and which they don’t.

  • Knowing the success of features means you can iterate your designs - change them and try different combinations to see which ones your users like the best.

  • Fyresite’s favorite tool for heat maps - Hotjar 

• Enable Lazy Loading

  • Who said being lazy can’t be more efficient? Lazy loading defers loading of certain elements on a page until they’re on the screen.

    • This means that if your page has images, the image won’t load until the user is on the part of the page where the image is, instead of waiting for all images to be loaded before loading the page.

Troubleshooting Tools

Need a clearer view of where your site speed is currently? Here are our favorite tools for gauging site speed performance.

• Google Lighthouse 

  • Google Lighthouse is such a good benchmark for site speed, platforms like Shopify use it. Google Lighthouse can be used to audit page performance, giving information performance, accessibility, and more.

• GTMetrix

  • GTMetrix offers both free and paid plans. This service allows you to see important speed metrics. The paid plan will send you messages when your site speed has changed.

• Shopify Theme Inspector for Google Chrome

  • Shopify merchants will benefit from this Google Chrome extension. Your chosen Shopify theme can greatly impact loading times, and this tool finds issues with your liquid code.

    • Word of warning - this tool is very technical and might be easier for a developer to work with.

• Fyresite

  • If you’re a Shopify merchant, check out one of our continuous improvement plans. Clients under a CI plan can use their allotted time for a number of site improvements, including site speed optimization.

  • Take a look at our services!

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