There are numerous reasons why the load time of a web shop should have a prominent place on your priority list. Do you know why and what the effect of load time is on your webhop’s conversion? Find out in this article!
What do we mean with: “load time”?
The load time of a website refers to how long it takes for a website to fully load. Technically, load time means how long a browser takes to load data from a web server, until it is visible on the screen of a visitor. This includes all the content of a page, like images, text, etcetera.
Simply put: the load time is how fast all content is loaded on a web page, after the page is requested.
What determines the load time of your webshop?
The load time of your webshop depends on different factors, like: page type, the amount of content, file sizes, plugins and your webshop server / hosting. But, you can make a big impact on these factors by, for example, resizing your images. Also, a specialized hosting partner can help you optimize these different factors to speed up your load times.
How fast should your webshop be?
In short, your shop should load as fast as possible! Ideally, you’ll want your webshop to load within two seconds. The two-to-three second mark is the turning point where bounce rates skyrocket – in fact, 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site. Of course, the patience of the visitor is reliant on the industry and the context of the web shop’s usage.
How can you measure the load time of your webshop?
As you can imagine by now, it is important to know how fast your webshop actually is. Google Search Console and Google Analytics provide (longterm) information about your webshops load times.
If you want to start right away with improving your webshops load times, other tools might also be helpful to use. With tools like PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix you can directly check if the adjustments you made, actually make your shop faster, plus they also show you why your site is slow and offer you optimization opportunities. Check them out yourself!
The effect of load time on your webhop’s conversion
As mentioned before, Google recommends a load time below 2 seconds. Nevertheless, a lot of webshops take more than 5 seconds to fully load. This does not seem much, but think about it yourself: do you like to wait when you are shopping? Online or offline? Definitely not! And the same goes for your customers. It is therefore really important to lower the load time of your shop, as it is the most prominent reason why visitors leave.
The importance of hosting in Conversion Optimization
The quality of your e-commerce hosting has a major impact on the load time of your webshop. But there are many more factors why hosting impacts your online success. If you want to know more, please download our Whitepaper about The importance of hosting in Conversion Optimization!
In this extensive paper we address the commercial value of e-commerce hosting and explain why the choice of a hosting provider is not only a technical, but also a commercial decision.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Hi! My name is Dion, Account Manager at Hypernode
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