CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Mini-Degree Scholarship Program Week 5 Review

I left off last week’s blog post covering the ‘pricing and pricing pages’ module for the CRO best practices section of the Conversion Optimization Mini Degree training. This week, I will continue to go through more of the best practices modules starting with the website speed optimization module.

I learned this prior to taking this course with my own e-commerce website. Website speed matters. Big time. There is no doubt that a fast-loading website of nay kind will perform better in every way imaginable. A faster speed-optimized website gives website visitors a much more seamless user experience, higher conversion rates, more engagement (and less bouncing and drop off), and higher rankings in the search engine algorithms like Google.

It is a no-brainer optimization best practice that can be overlooked but makes a world’s difference, with even the tiniest of improvements being enough to change the amount of money a website can make compared to the equivalent website with even any measurable increase in loading speed.

Improving website speed typically occurs at the coding level or by tinkering with caching or a CDN. For site speed optimization, I personally do not know how to do the IT or development work, so I outsource to someone who can handle and implement these things for me on my Shopify e-commerce store backend.

Before doing this though, there are ways to check site speed information. One way to do so is through Google Analytics under the Behavior -> Site Speed. An important thing to note once in Google Analytics is to pay attention to the page speed load time for individual pages (such as the main landing page or product page for e-commerce driven from paid traffic) rather than be heavily focused on the average load speed (for the entire site). The higher the traffic for a page that are integral parts of the sales funnel, the more we want to pay attention to them.

Some of the top metrics to look at are:

- average document interactive time: how many seconds until the page is usable?
- average page load time: how many seconds to load the page fully?

Of the two metrics, document interactive time is the most important since it is how real website visitors perceive page speed, which is how long that it takes to render the content on the specific webpage above the fold. There may be a huge video or other things loading below the fold, but it won’t matter for how a user interprets the site’s speed really since it is not the first thing people see right away.

For page load time, there area. few factors that are involved: redirection time, domain-lookup time, server-connection time, and sever-response time. These are mostly determined by the web host and DNS speed. Caching and CDNs can help towards resolving factors that may slow down the response of your server.

The module continues by showing a report for pages that get the most page views on a website and comparing whether the load speed is better or worse than the website’s average load speed. The ones in red are slower than average. After doing the analysis of the report finding the pages in red, take those URLs and check them under Speed Suggestions in Google Analytics or enter the URLs to Google PageSpeed Insights tool. The more errors you see (especially ones indicated in red) once the URL is entered in PageSpeed, the better. You can fix the issues and improve load speed. If everything checked out fine, it would be more challenging to figure out how to improve load speed.

Among other things, some other tools and strategies to look at to find ways to improve and evaluate site speed include:

- sitespeed.io
- GTMetrix
- Pingdom
- Caching and CDNs
- minimizing round-trip times (RTTs)

We have covered most of these tools and briefly, but here is a quick summary of things to do to minimize RTTs:

- Combine all your javascript files into one to minimize requests.
- Combine images with css sprites. The higher the number of images used on a page, the more roundtrips there are between visitor’s browser and the web server. Tools to create css sprites are : Compass, SpritePad, and Spriteme.
- Avoid css @import and use a <link> tag for each stylesheet.
- Minimize DNS lookups. Avoid using multiple domain names when loading a site.
- Minimize redirects.

So, with that said, what is the ideal site speed?

Obviously, one-second load time (or less) would be nice. Usually a load time under three seconds is good . If load speed is under seven seconds, it is typically alright too. Anything over 10 seconds definitely could and should be improved. Not doing so would mean losing out on money in significant quantities.

A test of load times of the top 2,000 retail websites from Strangeloop found that web pages keep getting bigger, and the average website takes 10 seconds to load. A typical e-commerce website takes 4.9 seconds to serve usable content.

While people can handle up to a 10-second page load time, it is important to consider a few points that will make optimizing page load speed a priority for those who do not:

- 47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
- 57% of website visitors abandon a page that takes 3 seconds or more to load
- At peak traffic times, more than 75% of online consumers left for a competitor’s website rather than suffer page load delays
- Tolerable waiting time for information retrieval is about 2 seconds. Adding feedback such as a progress bar can push tolerable waiting time up to 38 seconds.
- A website that loads in 3 seconds experiences 22% fewer page. views, a 50% higher bounce rate, and 22% fewer conversions than a website that loads within one second. While a website that loads in 5 seconds experiences a 35% fewer page views, a 105% higher bounce rate, and 38% fewer conversions.
- 8% of people cite slow loading pages as a key reason for abandoning a purchase.

To round this off, it cannot be understated the importance of what is an overlooked component of conversion rate optimization. In e-commerce, especially with paid traffic being driven to a product page, it is important to play into the biases and fast expectations of potential buyers to maximize the sales and experience they have. It is easy to implement and outsource this and I will continue to do pay attention to these strategies to improve site speed.

-David