How to increase conversion on your Shopify, Woocommerce, or Wix Ecommerce website with faster page speeds.
Three29 was selected as one of five global agencies to audit top companies that wanted to improve conversion on their e-commerce sites by Facebook. Their industries range from technology, lifestyle products, gifting, subscription, and logistics and in these retail websites we found four mistakes to be quite common. We want to empower our clients to get more sales with the knowledge they need to improve their Shopify, Woocommerce, or Wix e-commerce site. In this four-part series, we will go over the top website pitfalls, why to fix them, and how to fix them.
Top Four Ecommerce Website Pitfalls:
Low Page Speed Scores
Not optimized for mobile
Cumbersome Checkout Processes
Bad Product Photography
You might be wondering, why isn’t my site getting more sales? With the best of intentions, sites are created that aren’t optimized for conversion. Sometimes we are designing without the right knowledge or adequate budget and sometimes we’re working around a template that doesn’t seem to have the right solution. Whatever the reason may be, we see these mistakes often and by addressing these four things you will see an improvement on conversion, get longer time on site, and average more pages per session. Today we will talk about Low Page Speed Scores.
Improving your e-commerce website Tip 1: How To Improve Your Shopify, Woocommerce, or Wix e-commerce Website Page Speed Score
How to check the page speed score on your website using Lighthouse
One way to check your page speed is to pull up your website with the development tools in a Chrome browser window. Right-click anywhere on the page and select Inspect. Then click the tab that reads “Lighthouse”.
Here you can run a page speed test. E-commerce pages are much more intricate than a non-shoppable landing page, so on average scores will be lower, but 50-70 is considered a good score for this industry.
Why should I fix my page speed score and what does it mean?
Two top metrics to look at are the First Contentful Paint time & Time to Interactive. What is Contentful Pain? Contentful Paint is how long it takes for something to appear on the web page. And, what is Time to Interactive? Time to Interactive is how long it takes for something to be interacted with (clicked, added to cart, enlarged, etc). The page speed is based on either desktop or mobile (whichever you selected) without a wifi connection. All too often we see Time to Interactive times of over 15 seconds! Think of it this way. Have you ever been in line for coffee and the line is taking too long so you just leave? This is what is happening on your site. People get impatient and go to another, faster site.
Why does page speed score matter?
Page speed, unlike more ambiguous metrics on your site, is directly correlated to conversion. When page speed goes up, so does conversion. We see very, very few exceptions.
How to fix your page speed.
Three simple things. Some require a developer, some don’t.
First of all, reduce image sizes. Images should be as small as possible without losing clarity. We recommend absolutely nothing over 1MB. Smaller is always better.
Second, remove unused code/plugins. A developer may be needed here. Shopify, for example, keeps the code from a plugin even after you delete it from your dashboard. A dev is needed to find the plugin code and delete it. However, WordPress deletes the code when you delete the plugin. All too often plugins are installed just to try out and forgotten about and they can really affect how fast your site is.
Third, lazy load the bottom ⅔ of each page, so you’re only loading as much as the user needs to see at once. This can be especially crucial for pages with long scroll depth.
Will a faster page speed increase my conversion?
Point for point, doing the things listed above will increase conversion in almost every single case which is why it’s a great place to start.
Stay tuned for the other three e-commerce website pitfalls and how to fix them. For help on fixing your page speed, or any of your other website needs, get in touch.
