Threats Killing Your Shopify Sales & Profits
If your site loads too slowly, your store’s profits are suffering in 3 ways: Threats Killing Your Shopify Sales & Profits
- Your conversions are suppressed because shoppers lose patience with your slow-loading pages.
- Your search engine rankings are lower than they could be because Google is penalizing you for a poorer user experience.
- You’re paying over the odds for every paid click because Google (and soon Facebook) sting you with a lower quality score and higher CPC.
How slow loading pages are a complete conversion killer
It’s no secret that slow-loading pages mean you’re missing out on thousands of sales. In fact, research carried out by KISSmetrics, reports that for every one-second delay in page-load speed, your conversions will drop 7%. So for an average store generating $50k per month, that could mean $42k in lost revenue per year. But the bigger the store, the bigger the potential losses. Just add another zero to those numbers and the losses start to look pretty scary.
Even as far back as 2006, Amazon reported that for every 100 milliseconds they sped up their website. They saw a 1% increase in revenue. But since 2006, the average attention span of a web visitor has plummeted to just 8-seconds. So if your page loads in over 4-seconds, you have just 4-seconds left to impress them enough to stay and buy.
But here’s where it gets worse, according to a survey carried out by Akamai and Gomez.com. Almost half of the web users expect a site to load in 2-seconds or less. On top of that, they tend to abandon a site that doesn’t load within just 3-seconds.
You’re not just losing sales from visitors
The survey also revealed that 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with a website’s performance say they won’t come back to buy again. And what’s worse is, around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online so you’re not just losing sales from visitors currently on your site, but that loss ripples out to their friends and colleagues as well.
The end results — thousands of potential sales down the drain because of a few seconds difference in page-load time.
So what if you could slash 2-seconds off your load times? That would mean a potential 20% increase in revenue, based on Amazon’s findings.
Or you could see results similar to a more recent study by The Performance Beacon, which found pages that load just 1-second faster, experience a 27% increase in conversions.
Even if we were ultra-conservative, what would a 15% improvement in revenue be worth to you per year? If you’re serious enough about e-commerce to be reading this, it has to be worth an easy 6-figures or more per year.
If improving your page-load speed hasn’t rocketed to the top of your “Must Do List” by now, it should have. (To-Do lists aren’t effective as they become overwhelmingly long, but that’s a topic for another article, another time.)
But, if you’re still not convinced, keep reading…
Why page-load speed affects your search rankings
Google openly states that sites with a faster page-load speed will rank better because they offer a better user experience. Which makes total sense when you think about it.
Also, the Google PageSpeed Insights tool was created specifically to help webmasters race tune their websites because Google wants to serve a better user experience for its users.
And another thing, The Performance Beacon’s study that I mentioned earlier? They also found that a 1-second increase in page load time increases the bounce rate by 56%, and as you likely know, the bounce rate is a significant ranking factor for SEO.
With this in mind, it’s imperative that your store’s page-load speed is optimized because not only do you get improved conversions, but also more traffic when you improve your page-load speed.
Faster page-loads mean cheaper clicks
If you’re running AdWords, your quality score directly impacts how much you pay per click. And a significant factor in your quality score is your page-load speed. The simple fact is, Google penalizes you with expensive clicks if your site loads slowly. This is nothing new, but Facebook is about to roll out the same penalty as part of its quality scoring system for paid ads. So, if you’re not suffering yet, you will be soon.
But on the other hand, if you reduce your page-load times, you’ll be rewarded with lower CPC’s and higher conversions. Which means that you can outbid and outmaneuver your competition at every turn.
What you can do to instantly improve your page-load speed
Luckily, there’s a simple solution to sluggish page-load speeds, one that will:
- Instantly boost your conversion rate with page-load times under 2-seconds
- Give you up to 4x faster page-load speeds and let you leapfrog your competition with an improved Google PageSpeed Insights score and better search rankings
- Dramatically reduce cart abandonment from impatient shoppers
- Lower your cost-per-click on your paid ads through better quality scores
It’s called SpeedBoost Ninja and you can find it here.
On top of that, we also offer a premium Shopify speed optimization service.