How can your website performance improve conversions rates?

Your website performance matters a lot more than you think. It also affects a lot more of your stats than you think. Believe it or not, but your site speed affects your bounce rate, search rankings, and even conversions.
Ignoring your website’s performance can affect your engagement, conversions, and therefore, even your revenue.

In this guide, we’ll help you understand how your website’s performance can affect your conversion rate at the end of the funnel.

Discovery

In most cases, new users discover a website through organic search, social sharing, or paid campaigns. A few of these important discovery mechanisms are directly impacted by website performance. Website crawlers might have some difficulty indexing sites that are slow or have extensive client-side rendering and Javascript.

Your site speed can also be a ranking factor on web search, ad campaigns, or social networks. You must keep it in mind that new users who discover your website will get an uncached first load. This means that they’ll essentially get the worst possible experience. This can be especially frustrating if some investment was made to get the user to the website, just to see them dropping off due to a long first load.

Ensure that you use appropriate tools to optimize the first load of the website because first impressions matter. If the first load is too slow, the user may never stay around to look at your products. Loading times of a website are directly related to bounce rates, which in turn often correlate well with conversions.

Engagement

Once you get users to your site, you need to keep them engaged with your high-quality content. You can verify this in your analytics console by observing the session length, time-on-page, pages-per-session, and general user flows.

Apart from various UX best practices, a smooth, fast, and responsive experience are key here. Optimizing a website for discovery involves optimizing for the perfect first load. On the other hand, optimizing for engagement means fast navigation and fast repeat loads.

Also, analyze at which steps of the flow users drop out and then relate back to speed metrics for these navigations. This can be analyzed through WebPageTest or through the Chrome DevTools Record feature.

Conversion

Website conversions are often bound to good discovery coupled with great engagement, but there are few additional points to remember. Users expect call-to-action buttons to be rendered and labeled quickly, hero images to load fast, pages to be responsive and less to no layout jumps/shifts.

Users will not buy anything if they can’t click the ‘Buy Now’ button due to a busy CPU or a jumping or unlabeled button. It’s usually best to measure and track the time-to-action towards a conversion or a subgoal for it. For example, the median time it takes for shoppers to get from landing on your site, to viewing a product, and to completing payment.

Re-Engagement

A study has shown that only 2% of users convert on their first visit. So, it’s important to get the other 98% to come back and re-engage with your content. Modern websites have different ways to do this. For example, it can be done via mail, tailored display ads in remarketing, or notifications. This works best if the flow from re-engagement to the website is as smooth as possible.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case. For instance, mail apps often open links in their in-app web-view. This slows down page load and complicating logins through a different cache and cookie storage. You must optimize for fast repeat loads and smooth UX flows in order to increase the probability of re-engagement.

Final Words

Ecommerce sites always strive for conversions, that are at the end of a purchase funnel. Every step along the funnel needs to be optimized for website speed to minimize bounce rates and drop-offs. There are different things to optimize for each step with different pitfalls and culprits. Observe the purchase funnel diagram shown below to understand better:

Got any questions? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll get back to you. You can also write to us for more comprehensive queries.