3 Reasons to Check Your Site’s Speed Before Cyber Monday

There’s a good chance you’re already aware of the detriment a slow ecommerce site could pose to your sales. With Cyber Monday coming soon, the need for speed increases. Online shoppers looking for as many deals as possible on the biggest online shopping day of the year won’t want to wait around for your site to load. 

If you’ve been putting off an audit of your site loading speeds, now’s the time to make your move. This year is expected to see a 16.6% growth to $72.41 billion for ecommerce sales in the United States. Can you afford to miss out on any of that money? Take a look at 3 more reasons you should ramp up your website’s load times in the next couple weeks.

Your Website Speed Affects Your Bottom Line

Two huge etailers, Walmart and Staples, both found that a one-second improvement in speed brought a huge improvement in conversions. For Walmart, one second faster on the site meant 2% more conversions. Staples experienced even better. For every second the site sped up, Staples increased conversions by 10%.

How much could you sell if you sped your site’s performance by only one second?

Your Site Has Most Likely Slowed This Year 

In the past year, websites have shown higher median load and time-to-interact times. Within one year, the TTI time grew from 5.3 seconds to 6.5. For a site to fully load, the median time has grown from 8.6 seconds to 11.4. Because around 30% of consumers say they’ll abandon a site after 10 seconds, the current median load time is above that number, we know consumers aren’t always hanging around long enough to make a purchase. 

There may be a reason for the slowing of your site. Read on.

Your Site Pages Have Probably Grown

Whether adding more products or more information about your current products, the fact is that your site has probably grown in the past year. The average site in 2013 had pages that were 1249kb, but this year those pages are 1492kb. The reason for the growth could be additional images, CSS files, JavaScript, or one of many other things.

These are all added in the name of improving your website, but you might just be slowing things down so much that buyers don’t want to wait around. Those images and additional files most certainly do help customers make a decision when they do get the chance to experience them. So, how can you provide everything buyers need to make a decision?

Your Solution Awaits

Because the growth of your site is what’s contributing to the slowing of your load times, your solution is to audit all images and files to ensure they’re as slim as possible. By compressing videos, cleaning up code, and uploading the right image types, you can speed your site up just in time for Cyber Monday. If you’ve been putting off cleaning up your site, now is the time.

We wish you a happy, healthy, and prosperous Cyber Monday!