Why Performance Matters
In today’s digital age, the performance of an e-commerce site is a critical factor in determining the success of an online business. A fast, reliable, and responsive e-commerce platform enhances the user experience and directly impacts sales and customer retention. Here’s why e-commerce performance is so important:
User Experience and Loyalty
A high-performing e-commerce site ensures a smooth and seamless user experience. Fast load times, intuitive navigation, and quick transaction processing make it easier for customers to find and purchase products. An Akamai report showed that when page load times increased from 3.3 to 4.3 seconds, conversion rates dropped from 4.75% to 3.52%, a 26% decrease.
Performance issues such as slow load times, errors, and crashes can frustrate customers, causing them to abandon their shopping carts and seek alternatives. Ensuring that your e-commerce site is reliable and efficient helps build trust and loyalty, encouraging customers to return for future purchases.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Differentiation
Performance is a key factor in search engine rankings. Google and other search engines prioritize websites that load quickly and provide a good user experience. An optimized e-commerce site will rank higher in search results, driving more organic traffic to your store and increasing the potential for sales.
In a crowded market, the performance of your e-commerce site can be a key differentiator. Businesses that invest in performance optimization can provide a superior shopping experience, attracting and retaining more customers compared to competitors with slower, less reliable sites. Google reports that the probability of a visitor bouncing increases 32% when page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
Don’t waste all your optimizations and ad spend getting users to your e-commerce site, only to have them leave immediately because it was slow.
Revenue Impact
Ultimately, the performance of your e-commerce site affects your bottom line. Faster sites lead to higher conversion rates, increased average order values, and better customer retention, all of which contribute to higher revenue. Conversely, poor performance can result in significant revenue losses due to abandoned carts and lost customers.
Investing in e-commerce performance optimization is not just about improving site speed; it’s about creating a better overall experience for your customers. By prioritizing performance, you can enhance user satisfaction, retain customers, boost SEO rankings, gain a competitive edge, and ultimately drive more revenue.
How Evolve Storefront Helps
With Evolve Storefront, we don’t think of performance optimization as something “to do later” or an annual event before Black Friday – we consider performance as a part of a minimal viable product and a necessary requirement for any e-commerce site.
Frictionless User Experience
Your developers might be great, but let’s face it—they’re not UI designers. Every visual and functional component—from the home page, checkout flow, and even the “My Account” page—in the Evolve Storefront has been designed by our expert User Experience Designers and optimized using analytics and customer feedback. This ensures everything for the shopper is consistent, intuitive, and easy to check out.
Automatic Image Optimization
Images provide your brand differentiation, marketing and promotional elements, and most importantly, visuals for your products for an e-commerce site. It’s no secret that these images are also the largest bandwidth abusers of any website. Large downloads mean slow page load times. Historically, creative and merchandising teams are good at providing images for e-commerce use, but they’re typically not so good at optimizing the images for the web. Teams that do optimize images, it’s usually a painstaking manual process to resize and compress images to predetermined versions of the images to handle mobile, desktop, and product thumbnails.
Evolve Storefront avoids all manual processes and the rigid nature of predetermining image sizes by having automatic image optimization built-in. Just upload your image and point your image URLs to it. That’s it. Let the storefront do the rest. Evolve Storefront will automatically convert older, common, and large file size image formats like JPG to modern, smaller formats like WEBP and AVIF. Evolve Storefront will also automatically detect device size to serve images in appropriate dimensions as well as lazy load images until they’re needed.
Perfect Google Lighthouse Scores
Google Lighthouse is a tool for assessing a web page in the Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO categories. All of these categories are scored independently and used as a factor in Google’s PageRank to determine where the web page appears in search results.
Every Evolve Storefront release is tested against Google Lighthouse to ensure we are hitting top scores across the board. While Performance is only a single metric, by ensuring top scores in all categories, Evolve Storefront helps shoppers get to your e-commerce site and keeps them there.
Summary
In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, performance is a key factor that can make or break your online business. Evolve Storefront ensures your front end is optimized out-of-the-box and ready to use. Ready to Evolve? Schedule a meeting or demo of Evolve Storefront today.
