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Top 2024 resources on speed

Best speed resource in 2024.
Learn more about speed to improve your e-commerce strategy.

  • 11 Website Page Load Time Statistics [+ How to Increase Conversion Rate] - Page load time is a critical metric that influences your entire site’s performance.
    Topics: increase, sites, rate, load, study, page, mobile, web, conversion, speed, statistics, site, website, average.
  • 3 Easy Ways You Can Speed Up a Video - Transitions are arguably the most important element of any piece of creative work. Whether it’s an article or video, engaging someone throughout its entirety requires you to elegantly weave your individual ideas and thoughts together into a cohesive narrative. Otherwise, if you abruptly hop from one point to another, you’ll throw your audience off and confuse them, increasing the likelihood that they’ll disengage with your work.
    Topics: clips, stretch, adobe, rate, video, easy, premiere, tool, speed, clip, ways, remapping.
  • 6 Tips to Optimize Your Store for The Holidays - Learn from one WooExpert what you should be doing now to prepare your store for the influx of holiday traffic, shoppers and purchases.
    Topics: woocommerce, speed, early, tips, store, host, traffic, holidays, test, site, holiday, optimize, sure, stores.
  • 8 Ways to Make Your Website Faster (and Why It Is Critical to Your Business) - Many factors contribute to a successful SEO strategy, and page speed is one of the most important ones.
    Topics: page, things, faster, business, pages, webpage, critical, ways, experience, website, load, speed, user, content, web.
  • 9 Quick Ways to Reduce Page Loading Speed - When it comes to your site's performance, page speed is of the utmost importance.
    Topics: quick, pages, sites, speed, loading, reduce, plugins, load, page, site, ways, web.
  • Analyzing Page Speed for Visitors with Slow Connections - Even if you have a fast loading site as measured by a high-speed internet connection, a good portion of your potential customers could be on slow connections. Your site could load slowly for them
    Topics: depot, connection, connections, load, slow, site, lowes, user, data, page, visitors, speed, analyzing.
  • April 2020 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts - Each month we publish roughly 50 articles to, hopefully, help ecommerce merchants. What follows are the 10 most popular articles that we published in April 2020. Articles from early in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones.
    Topics: free, video, list, covid19, conferencing, posts, popular, search, read, speed, month, help.
  • Assessing Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals’ on Shopify Themes - Google recently announced "Core Web Vitals," which are new performance metrics that will become a search ranking signal next year. Google displays the new metrics in Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and the Chrome User Experience Report. “Page Speed Scores of Every Shopify Theme,” my article in April, included a table of those speeds at that time.
    Topics: lab, users, metrics, googles, assessing, site, experience, shopify, core, page, themes, speed, vitals, web, data.
  • Carrefour invests in instant-delivery startup Cajoo - The Carrefour Group will acquire a minority stake in Cajoo, a French startup that delivers groceries in under 15 minutes. For Carrefour, the investment is a way to speed up quick commerce in France. Cajoo operates in ten cities across France and has over 100,000 users. The Carrefour Group announced… Continue reading
    Topics: carrefour, startup, instantdelivery, payment, cajoo, speed, delivery, france, invests, group, cities, whitepaper.
  • China to ship 3 billion parcels during post-COVID Singles’ Day - China’s e-commerce behemoths Alibaba and JD.com again claimed to have set records during the world’s largest shopping event, Singles’ Day. The figures can often be gamed to paint a rosy picture of perpetual growth, journalists and analysts have long observed, so they are limited metrics for measuring the firms’ performance or Chinese consumers’ purchasing power […]
    Topics: ship, china, postcovid, jdcom, shopping, day, singles, techcrunch, delivery, workers, parcels, alibaba, speed, logistics, billion.
  • - Covid-19 has accelerated key underlying global retail trends that were already reshaping the industry according to a new report by KPMG.
    Topics: covid19, retailers, speed, customer, report, global, shopping, reshaping, retail, online, kpmg, trends, need, business.
  • Did Nike just unlock the code for the future of retail? - Originally reported at Fast Company Nike’s six-story, NYC-based flagship store just opened (November 15, 2018) and with it a plethora...
    Topics: shop, online, flagship, digital, future, retail, shoppers, shopping, unlock, nike, code, store, speed.
  • Ecommerce challenge: Page speed optimization - Page speed can either make or break the user experience. Waiting for a website to load is no different than standing in line. Slow page load time dramatically increases the website bounce rate – a 4-second delay in page response results in a 25% abandonment rate. This article outlines the three ways to improve page speed optimization.
    Topics: website, challenge, page, fast, size, optimization, site, online, load, speed, sites, slow, ecommerce.
  • Envision B2B 2023 -
    Topics: booth, tools, speed, envision, b2b, product, team, experiences, unique, yeti, dynamic.
  • For SEO, How Fast Is Fast Enough? - Page speed improvements are high on most ecommerce to-do lists. The potential for increased revenue as well as better organic search rankings makes the effort worthwhile. But first, everyone wants to know how fast is fast enough.
    Topics: seo, offers, revenue, tools, speed, google, rankings, page, fast, paint, site, organic.
  • How Fast Is Your Online Store? Find Out With Shopify's New Online Store Speed Report - Creating a great shopping experience online isn’t just about features—it’s also about speed. That’s why we built a new report to help improve awareness of your Shopify store’s speed and measure it against businesses like yours.More
    Topics: videos, product, online, report, performance, shopifys, fast, store, customers, shopify, score, speed, stores.
  • How I Migrated 11 Sites from Magento to BigCommerce, Saved $1,000,000 and Increased Conversions 312% – All in 90 Days - When a boat has a hole, the crew spends half its time rowing and the other half with buckets, frantically…
    Topics: magento, saved, speed, right, bigcommerce, sites, increased, conversions, recovery, days, store, site, data, migrated, migration, cart.
  • How an HVACR supplier increased their speed to market and online sales with a modern ecommerce platform - By making the move to an API-driven headless commerce solution, Johnstone Supply was able to build what they want, when they want.
    Topics: ecommerce, solution, increased, market, modern, supplier, headless, commerce, johnstone, customer, business, product, speed, hvacr, platform, products, supply.
  • How to Achieve a High Performance Score on Google PageSpeed Insights for WooCommerce - Website performance is an essential aspect of web design that is often overlooked by agencies.  If your site responds and delivers content very quickly, you’ll receive many benefits – including an increase in conversions and better rankings in Google. At Herdl, we fully appreciate the benefits that high performance can offer across multiple marketing channels […]
    Topics: pagespeed, sites, hosting, speed, score, high, website, wordpress, server, using, achieving, performance, best, insights, site, google.
  • How to Create Powerful eCommerce Sliders - Sliders aren’t perfect for every situation. But when done right, they can make a huge impact with site visitors. How to make the most of eCommerce sliders.
    Topics: site, ecommerce, text, image, speed, images, plugin, add, great, white, powerful, sliders, slider, create.
  • How to Know If You Have Outgrown Your Commerce Platform - Your commerce platform is a critical piece of your strategy that can enable your brand to deliver unique customer experiences and drive revenue growth for your brand. But not all platforms are created equal and some actually hinder a brand’s ability to bring their vision to life. Whether it’s a dated reference architecture, clunky functionality, or antiquated pricing, brands find themselves held back instead of propelled forward by their technology. After speaking with many brands who are in the process of evaluating new commerce platforms, we have noticed a trend: those struggling tend to still be using dated, legacy commerce platforms.This simple fact can often go overlooked as brands stick with what they know and don't recognize how much of a hindrance their current commerce platform may be. Read on to see some of the common signs that your brand has outgrown your commerce platform and how transitioning to a more modern microservices-based platform can alleviate some of those ailments. Some of the common complaints we hear include spending too many resources on workarounds, waiting on IT teams to implement costly projects to add functionality, and increasing cost without continuous innovation. This results in a half-baked execution of your vision and underwhelming performance. If this sounds familiar, you are likely running a legacy all-in-one (monolithic) platform. When they first emerged in the early 2000s, legacy commerce platforms like Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Shopify were designed to address a wide plethora of basic commerce needs with a single offering. Indeed, they were successful in meeting the needs of the time. But, with the demands of customers evolving, the rigid nature of these platforms leaves brands being outpaced by competitors who have invested in new technology. Several point-providers for specific functionality have stepped in to provide a better solution than the relatively simplistic offerings from legacy all-in-one commerce platforms. With a Composable Commerce approach, you can leverage these best-of-breed third-party solutions and a headless commerce platform to develop a solution that delivers the customer experiences and performance your eCommerce teams envision. Struggles With Speed Limiting Your Brand's Growth The first sign that you have outgrown your commerce platform is inability to move fast. When evaluating the performance of your current commerce solution, speed is essential. We can talk about speed in two key facets—first, the speed of your platform, i.e., what your customers experience. Slow page load times or poor mobile experiences can lead to lost revenue. To learn more, check out our post here. Many brands will have ongoing projects to improve their stores' performance and see minor improvements on specific key metrics with changes to their CDNs, marketing tags, personalization engines, etc. However, these improvements are often incremental at best and generally lead to hitting a wall with what is possible with legacy architecture. Achieving the ideal 'under 4s' load time mark can be out of reach with a legacy commerce platforms' tightly coupled capabilities and reference architecture code base. With an API-first architecture, typical in Headless Commerce platforms like Elastic Path, achieving lightning-fast load times is simple because these solutions were designed around the speed and scalability delivered of cloud infrastructure. The second facet of 'speed' is how quickly (and easily) you can add on functionality like a mobile checkout touchpoint, best-in-class search capabilities, or a payment gateway to deliver experiences that your customers expect. With legacy platforms, brands often embark on costly extension projects requiring specific developer expertise. For example, those using Salesforce Commerce Cloud are only able to hire Salesforce developers and architects who cost $12,000 more per hire. Not only is it more expensive to undertake these projects, but they will also take significantly longer due to the architecture of the legacy commerce platforms necessitating extensive testing to ensure all connected pieces are working after making any additions.   Ready to Consider Replatforming? If your business has outgrown your current ecommerce platform, check out our webinar, "Replatforming Tips to Embrace Composable Commerce," for advice on how to move to a more modern solution. Watch the Webinar Business Teams Frustrated by Bottlenecks The second sign you have outgrown your commerce platform is rigid functionality that requires customization to meet your requirements. These bottlenecks to improvements can break down into two route causes. We often hear that marketing and merchandising teams struggle to keep pace with customers' demands since they need to wait on the IT team to implement seemingly simple changes. A prime example of this is when merchandising teams want to launch unique strategies like dynamic bundles, complex pricing, or child-variant level merchandising, but their commerce platform does not support it without custom developer work. And, this challenge isn’t just with legacy platforms, we see the same issues arise with some of the MACH-vendors in today’s landscape. Your merchandising team will end up with delayed time to market and missed opportunities all thanks for the lack of flexibility of catalog and merchandising capabilities. With Catalog Composer from Elastic Path, merchandisers can rapidly create complete catalogs that tailor to specific needs of your customers across channels, touchpoints, and geographies with ease. A similar challenge occurs for making frontend updates. With a legacy commerce platform, the ability for merchandisers to make quick changes to the storefront can simply be impossible. Instead, they have to submit a ticket to IT and wait until it is tackled. On the other hand, with a composable architecture, brands can choose a frontend technology and CMS (Content Management System) that allows business users to make these changes. This approach saves resource hours while also providing significantly more flexibility when delivering the vision of a unique front end that caters to the complexities of your specific business. Planned Expansions Hindered by Your Current Commerce Platform The third sign you have outgrown your commerce platform is inability to expand your digital business to meet revenue goals. At Elastic Path we see brands looking to increase their digital revenue by expanding to new business models (like B2B or B2B2C), geographies, brands, or touchpoints. Unfortunately, many legacy platforms were built in the early 2000s when this type of expansion was irrelevant. Therefore, their technology struggles to keep up with these new business needs without customization. In the case of business model extension where each model comes with its complexities, legacy platforms like Salesforce offer a wholly different product to cater to these needs. For example, brands who want to power both B2C and B2B need to run two entirely separate platforms. Running two platforms can double up the headaches caused by the problems discussed above but will also mean that you are paying license fees and staffing for both products individually. It is important to note that with other modern Headless Commerce vendors, you will need to use and pay for multiple platform instances rather than separate products to cater to use cases like multi-geo, multi-account, B2B, etc. The complexity introduced in these cases with the need for several differentiated catalogs with distinct hierarchies and pricebooks can be impossible to manage with a single instance. Additional instances are needed since other Headless Commerce vendors lack the flexibility a de-coupled catalog architecture provides. Catalog Composer delivers this flexibility with unlimited catalogs that allow you to create bespoke catalogs 5x faster for every route-to-market from a single instance of the platform. Even without channel expansion plans, brands looking to add functionality are forced into complicated implementations with a legacy commerce platform. A good example is payment gateways. Some legacy platforms might have the ability to add a specific third-party vendor to add Buy Now Pay Later capabilities. Managing multiple vendors for each payments capability is something two-thirds of brands are looking to avoid. Check out Elastic Path Payments to learn how you can easily accept payments across channels, touchpoints, and geographies from a single payment offering. Omnichannel commerce platforms like Elastic Path Commerce Cloud allow you to run all the channels and touchpoints your brand needs from a single instance of the platform. This way, you are cutting down on the Total Cost of Ownership while providing a better customer experience. Struggling to Increase Margins with an Expensive Commerce Platform As you will have noticed, a common challenge across many of the issues that brands face when outgrowing a legacy commerce platform is a high Total Cost of Ownership. By moving away from a legacy platform to a Headless Commerce platform, you can increase your top and bottom-line revenues as these benefits add up across lower platform fees, less expensive implementation projects, or simply lowering the cost associated with your team needing to manage the complexity of a legacy solution. For a more comprehensive look at how you can lower your Total Cost of Ownership, check out our guide here. Chat with us today if any of the common signs above hit close to home. We would be happy to help determine how to successfully circumvent the issues holding back your brand's growth and establish a commerce solution that fits your needs today and into the future.
    Topics: commerce, platforms, know, functionality, needs, platform, legacy, architecture, speed, brands, specific, outgrown.
  • How to Optimize Images to Speed Up Your Online Store - People like fast sites; search engines like fast sites.  Everyone on the Internet likes fast-loading sites. Think about how you use the web:  If you’re specifically looking to purchase something, waiting even 10 seconds for a page to load can be insanely frustrating. As an eCommerce site owner, how can you easily improve the speed […]
    Topics: store, speed, site, page, web, image, images, online, size, file, quality, optimize.
  • How to Plan for Black Friday — and Why You Should Start Now - Don’t be caught off guard! This year’s holiday shopping season will be bigger than ever — sprint ahead of the competition with these 9 key considerations.
    Topics: sales, good, customers, youre, speed, site, things, start, sure, woocommerce, plan, black.
  • How to Prepare Your WooCommerce Store for a Surge of Customers - A sudden surge in website traffic is every online store owner’s dream. If you’re already working to promote your site using social media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and other marketing strategies, you’ve probably seen a steady growth in your traffic over time.  But what if your store gets a sudden surge of traffic? Is your […]
    Topics: store, website, version, using, customers, site, youre, hosting, prepare, speed, woocommerce, performance, surge, traffic.
  • - The goal of every online store owner is to get traffic to their site that will ultimately lead to conversions.  But not every user who comes to your site will turn into a customer. In fact, not every user will even engage with the content on your site.  The top […]
    Topics: page, load, website, properly, run, user, speed, site, redirects, server, test.
  • How to Scale Your Online Store with WooCommerce - How do you scale WooCommerce? We debunk the myth that WooCommerce can't scale and share the five things you need to know to scale successfully.
    Topics: load, scale, stock, site, hosting, server, speed, store, woocommerce, online, website.
  • - Learning how to speed up a Shopify website is one of the best things you can do to improve your store’s chances of success. Faster-loading websites not only help you to convert more customers, but they can also increase brand… Continue reading How to Speed Up a Shopify Website: 10 Tips for 2024
    Topics: speed, performance, tools, website, shopify, images, store, page, tips, sites, content.
  • How to Speed up Your WordPress eCommerce Website? - WordPress is the world’s most popular Content Management System. Nowadays, it is no longer used as just a blogging tool. Instead, it can power a wide variety of websites, including eCommerce. In fact, the number of eCommerce websites that are… Continue reading How to Speed up Your WordPress eCommerce Website?
    Topics: plugin, ecommerce, load, wp, website, cart, plugins, page, speed, wordpress.
  • Improve WordPress Page Speed in 2019 (w/ Plugin Tips) - Keeping your WordPress web pages loading at blazing fast speeds takes effort and diligence, but can easily bring strong returns.…
    Topics: page, plugin, speeds, site, loading, web, improve, wordpress, w, speed, website, plugins, tips, hosting.
  • - JD has developed a partnership with Chinese retailer Better Life as part of its Retail as a Service strategy.
    Topics: inventory, stores, teams, customers, user, strategy, jd, speed, better, retail, life, deliveries, offline.
  • July 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts - What follows are the most popular articles that we published in July 2018. Articles published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones. 58 Leading ...
    Topics: list, popular, extensions, marketing, chrome, posts, content, read, optimization, speed, search, site.
  • One-Click Checkout with EP Payments Boosts Conversions & Checkout Speed - Customer expectations are escalating rapidly, and what people learn to love in one industry—like effortless food delivery—increasingly defines what they expect from other industries. These ever-shifting expectations put pressure on businesses to meet their customers where they are—delivering products faster, cheaper, and more seamlessly than ever. Most checkout experiences have upwards of 18 fields, adding to a long, complicated checkout process and giving customers the perfect opportunity to abandon their carts. According to the Baymard Institute, 70% of customers will leave when the checkout process takes too long. Other research finds that most sites only need eight form fields for a checkout flow. Watch our webinar to learn how to overcome the five common checkout mistakes that over 90% of brands make. At Elastic Path, we obsess over checkout optimization, to help brands improve their conversion rates continually. We’re thrilled to offer one-click checkout for all businesses using EP Payments, powered by Stripe, at no extra cost.  How easy is it for customers to use one-click checkout? See for yourself: the examples below showcase the benefit of a simple and intuitive checkout flow for your customers.  One-click checkout relies on the largest “rapid checkout” network in the industry; with Stripe’s 30M+ known customers, one-click checkout auto-fills your customers' payment and shipping details so they can check-out in a single click. Enabling one-click checkout is easy; simply add and customize the payment element on the frontend, your customers will enjoy an easy and secure checkout experience.  EP Payments Support Complex Checkouts Across Brands & Channels Go to EP Payments Drive Tangible Business Results: Increase conversions. Reduce cart abandonment by creating a frictionless, fast checkout experience. One-click checkout increases conversion rates by over 7% for known customers. Speed up checkout. By optimizing the process, customers can check-out in just six seconds— nine times faster than anonymous customers. Optimize the user experience. A simple checkout flow creates a better user experience for returning customers. Known customers purchase four times more often than anonymous customers. The one-click checkout experience is just as safe as it is simple for customers. The sensitive data is encrypted to keep it secure, and as a certified PCI Service Provider Level 1, EP Payments one-click checkout meets the highest level of certification available in the payments industry. Other benefits include: 1. Saves Customer Payment Info Customers that choose to save their payment details and shipping address to your one-click checkout-enabled storefront experience a quicker checkout. It auto-fills saved payment details and a shipping address with just a few simple steps. 2. Security: Mobile Verification When customers use one-click checkout on a new site or new device, they’ll receive a one-time code to verify their identity. 3. Improve Checkout Speed Enable buyers to check out in just six seconds—that’s nine times faster for known customers versus anonymous customers. Optimizing checkout speed and ease of use is critical for an exceptional checkout experience. Existing customers can visit EP Payments to turn on one-click checkout. If you’re a new customer, we’d love to chat with you today to see how EP Payments and one-click checkout can supercharge your conversion rates.
    Topics: customers, checkout, oneclick, boost, conversions, simple, payments, fast, ep, speed, known, experience, payment, times.
  • Otto Group closes German returns-processing facility - Otto Group has announced the upcoming closure of the last returns-processing facility in Germany. The facility is operated by Otto subsidiary Hermes Fulfilment in Hamburg and will be closed down in the second half of next year. The Otto Group says it had analyzed all possible alternatives and, after prolonged… Continue reading
    Topics: otto, returnsprocessing, speed, group, facility, decision, tough, german, germany, returned, returns, closes.
  • Page Speed Scores of Every Shopify Theme - I recently worked with a developer to help a merchant speed up its Shopify store. We improved the page speed for mobile and desktop. But the biggest takeaway was how a Shopify theme impacts the page speed. This post lists page speeds of all 72 Shopify themes.
    Topics: metrics, shopify, scores, speed, theme, page, measures.
  • - Three quarters of retailers believe their business model needs to change for them to remain relevant.
    Topics: face, models, change, retail, research, velocity, success, retailers, speed, business, world, companies, congress, irrelevancy.
  • SEO: Shaving Seconds Off Page Speed - For customers, site speed matters. For search engines, site speed impacts organic rankings. With its mobile Speed Update rolling out now, Google is applying site speed to mobile search results ...
    Topics: performance, seconds, google, loading, site, seo, rankings, search, mobile, shaving, page, speed, sites.
  • Same-day delivery apps need more than speed to survive post-pandemic - Consumer satisfaction hinges on more than the amount of time it takes to move an order from an app to the customer’s door.
    Topics: speed, order, customers, technology, postpandemic, sameday, model, delivery, apps, customer, services, survive, techcrunch, need, app, business.
  • - In today's fast-paced digital world, users expect sites to load quickly and efficiently. Slow website speed can lead to frustrated customers, decreased sales, and lower search engine rankings In this article, we will explore the importance of page speed for… Continue reading Shopify Site Speed Optimization for 2023 (Actionable Insights)
    Topics: insights, actionable, ensure, store, shopify, speed, website, app, load, user, optimization, slow, site.
  • Speed Up Your Slowest Pages with Prefetching - In previous articles I’ve addressed ideas to improve page speed, such as with HTML caching and isolating slow loading resources. In this post, I'll explain how to determine your slowest pages and apply a simple fix to speed them up.
    Topics: web, prefetching, target, speed, browser, load, slowest, pages, page, slow, report, user.
  • Speed and Reliability are Key When Choosing an Ecommerce Web Hosting Solution - Seemingly minute differences in performance translate into big losses when you operate 24/7.
    Topics: website, platform, business, solution, cost, speed, key, choosing, youre, site, ecommerce, web, hosting, size, downtime, reliability.
  • Ten Ways to Improve the Speed of Your WooCommerce Store - How slow is too slow? Every second counts! Don’t let a slow site chase customers way. Speed up your store with these ten proven and easy-to-implement tips.
    Topics: site, hosting, php, blog, images, theme, plugins, load, store, speed, youre, woocommerce, official, ways, server, proven.
  • The 3 Common Mistakes of Ecommerce Launches - I've consulted over the years on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ecommerce launches. Here are three frequent mistakes in the building of online stores.
    Topics: mistakes, ecommerce, site, mobile, design, shoppers, cart, launches, speed, products, load, needs, common, online.
  • The 8-Step Guide to Achieving 100% Google Page Speed - Nothing ruins a great website more than a poor loading experience. In fact, Google has said that visitors who experience a load time of seven seconds are 113% more likely to bounce off a page.
    Topics: size, 8step, mobile, speed, achieving, page, guide, website, image, site, file, google, load.
  • The Trade-offs of Third-party Add-ons - Third-party apps and add-ons can enhance an ecommerce platform. Examples include exit popups, customer reviews, product recommendations, and marketing automation. But third-party add-ons can create more problems than benefits.
    Topics: performance, speed, improve, addon, site, slow, experience, create, thirdparty, tradeoffs, addons.
  • Top 5 Mobile Page Speed Fixes - We've tackled in previous posts mobile page speed and Google’s efforts to drive mobile-first indexing. Having built and advised many mobile ecommerce sites, I’ve discovered hundreds of optimization tactics. In this post, I'll share the top five issues that impact mobile page speed in my experience. I’ll also offer tips to assess and quickly fix.
    Topics: mobile, sites, files, page, set, server, fixes, speed, file, site, javascript.
  • Useful (and Useless) Mobile Ecommerce Metrics - In my experience, there are a few "cuts" of data that matter more for mobile than for desktop. Conversely, there are a handful of traditional metrics from desktops that are not as important on mobile or potentially difficult to optimize.
    Topics: metrics, speed, useful, site, desktop, ecommerce, bounce, device, users, rate, useless, devices, mobile.
  • What Is First Contentful Paint? + An Action Plan to Improve It - If you could improve your website's performance by 10%, would you?
    Topics: action, score, performance, contentful, page, fcp, lighthouse, load, site, improve, speed, plan, paint.
  • WhatsApp brings its Business API to the cloud to speed adoption - WhatsApp will today begin beta testing a new, cloud-based version of its WhatsApp Business API, hosted on parent company Facebook’s infrastructure. With the shift to the cloud, the setup time for integrating with the API will drop from weeks to only minutes, the company claims, so businesses can more quickly transition to WhatsApp’s API platform […]
    Topics: users, customers, way, today, messaging, api, businesses, business, speed, brings, whatsapp, cloud, company, techcrunch, adoption.
  • Why Page Load Time Matters - Have you ever been frustrated by an online shopping experience? Clicked on a link while scrolling social but abandoned it because the product page loaded too slowly? Increasingly, customers expect convenient and seamless experiences when buying online. These expectations can have a surprisingly impactful effect on your brand's bottom line. When it comes to eCommerce, an often-neglected aspect is website performance. How fast your website loads directly impacts your customer experience and outcomes. Is your website doing all it can to encourage purchases, or is it causing your brand to leave dollars on the table? Does it Matter to Your Brand? Over the past couple of years, you've undoubtedly heard about the increasing use of mobile to make purchases, both for B2C and B2B brands. Flashy stats and presentations often lead to knee-jerk reactions like setting up a mobile channel but fall short on delivering an experience that will help your brand convert more sales. As ever, the numbers don't lie. Here are a few stats to consider: “When pages load in less than 4 seconds they win 59% of the conversions, and those that exceed the four second mark experience 58% of the bounces” - eCommerce Speed Hub Each second of a buyer’s journey matters, ‘the Site Speed Standard benchmark data proves that reducing page load time by just 1 second results in a 3 – 5% conversion lift’ - eCommerce Speed Hub Before your customers can make a purchase, ensuring they make it through the door is essential to making a sale with the probability of a bounce increases 90% as mobile page loads go from 1s to 5s. Another added benefit is that your site speed directly impacts where you will rank on search. A few years ago, Google even announced it as an update, yet a significant number of retail sites still have poor load times. "Sixty-four percent of all online retail is from mobile, but conversion rates on mobile are only half that of desktop. That's more people browsing, but fewer people buying... In fact, we've seen that companies who commit to great mobile design are seeing 32% increases in revenue. And, get this, up to 400% improvement in conversion rates. " - Adrienne Clem, Director of Search Ads Growth and Optimization at Google. Check out our mobile commerce guide to learn more. This isn’t to say that mobile experiences should be the be the sole focus of your page speed optimizations. Providing seamless experiences across channels is a crucial benefit of a cloud-based Headless Commerce platform like Elastic Path; it's a perfect fit for your website's scalable, near-instantaneous performance. To learn more about how a Headless Microservices-based cloud platform, check out our guide to Headless commerce here.   Build Faster, Seamless eCommerce Experiences Start building the unique commerce experience your business demands with a faster, more flexible and scalable headless solution. Sign up for a free trial What Site Speed Should You Target and How Do You Get There? The holy grail of website performance is simple: a page load time of 3s. Two of the usual culprits for lagging performance are large images (file size), and the architecture used to build your site (from poorly designed coding to back-end systems like your eCommerce platform). Thankfully, there are a plethora of resources to help guide you on your optimization journey. We recommend Google's PageSpeed insights tool to start. The tool helps determine where you stand, and how you can start to make improvements. Optimizations will be an ongoing process for your IT team, however, it’s great to have the peace of mind that your eCommerce platform can help support your journey to stellar performance. Here’s a quick snapshot of what an Elastic Path powered site performs like. Versus a not-so-great performance on other Headless Commerce platforms. Ready to switch to an eCommerce platform that helps rather than hinders your website's performance? Chat with us today to see how Elastic Path can help your brand.
    Topics: page, speed, commerce, site, experience, headless, website, performance, ecommerce, load, mobile, matters.
  • Why Performance Matters: Making Site Speed, Scalability and Reliability a Priority in 2020 - An alarming number of today’s ecommerce websites aren’t performing as well as they should be. They are either too slow…
    Topics: legacy, bigcommerce, experience, site, priority, reliability, speed, need, scalability, pages, mobile, ecommerce, platform.
  • Why Site Performance Matters and How to Improve It - Site performance (or lack thereof) is one of the biggest pain points eCommerce businesses face today, due in part to its direct correlation to conversion rate. If you don’t think site performance matters to your customer - your revenue, and your reputation, are at risk. I’ll cover why site performance matters and how best to improve it if you find yourself on the slower end of the speed trial. Consider this: It takes about fifty milliseconds, or .05 seconds, for users to form an opinion about your site and determine if they will stay or go. Think about your personal experience with a slower-paced load time on a site. How many times have you bounced off as quickly as you found it? From ordering a pizza to buying a couch, today’s consumer simply does not have time to wait.   Fifty-seven percent  of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed web application on mobile. Given the miniscule timeframe to make a good first impression on a consumer, plus the hefty influence of word-of-mouth first impressions by those same consumers (either favorable or less than), site performance is not a “nice to have,” it is critical. Poor site performance is expensive. Industries may vary as far as numbers, but let’s see on average what the damage looks like when it comes to what slow site speed will cost you. For example, if you’re running an ecommerce site that makes $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could  cost you $2.5 million  per year in lost sales. To put that in eCommerce behemoth terms, let’s take Amazon. Performance tests showed they would lose $1.6 BILLION every year if they slowed down by just one second. What is the Benchmark for Optimal Site Speed? The Google-recommended page load time is under  two seconds. Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability, while Google aims to keep load time under a half-second. Additional food for thought: 47% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds are less, while studies show for every 100ms decrease in home page load speed results in a 1.11% lift in session-based conversion. Other factors that affect site performance to keep in mind: mobile device usage, bandwidth, and variable internet speeds by user region. So now that you’re aware of the high stakes of slow site speed, the good news is you have options for improving it. First things first, always be testing. Web Application Performance & Speed Testing Tools There are many products and services in the market to diagnose web application speed and performance. It’s important to have a clear picture of how your site is performing and be able to make tweaks quickly and easily. More benefits to these tools include: Find out how your site is performing across devices. Most users are visiting through a mobile device so optimization is key See how your site is performing across regions and countries Analyze and optimize for better rankings and UX Triage bottlenecks and make optimization decisions based on ROI and conversion rates Interested in Learning More About Elastic Path Commerce Cloud? Launch and optimize innovative experiences fast, with a modern, headless, SaaS, API-first, & microservices-based commerce platform. See the Future of eCommerce The Top Web Performance/Speed Testing Tools: Pingdom Speed Test GTmetrix Google PageSpeed Insights Yellow Lab Tools WebPage Test KeyCDN Website Testing Tools DotCom-Monitor Dareboost IsItWP Website Speed Tool GiftOfSpeed     Figure 1: A typical Web Performance Tool interface Source: Pingdom Next Steps: How to Improve on Speed and Overall Performance Now that you’ve invested the time in the proper tools to monitor and improve site speed, and understand the slim window to keep a user engaged and on the path to purchase, here are a few things to consider that affect speed: Dynamic vs. Static Content Management – The difference between the two is dynamic content is anything subject to change based on user input such as product, pricing, or descriptions. This content is stored in a database and is fetched when the user engages with it, otherwise known as async communication. Static content on the other hand is anything remaining the same in the experience such as the navigation menu. Both types of content have distinct yet crucial functions on a site but are managed differently. While static content typically loads faster there are ways to manage dynamic content to alleviate issues and slower load times. As you edit dynamic content you want to avoid editing the HTML code as this will cause breaks in your site. Additionally when managing dynamic content use proper caching and Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to bridge the gaps between dynamic and static content. Use a Faster Website Host – upgrading your website host can significantly affect your site speed. While you’d also be looking at site uptime, traffic volume (especially the ability to manage spikes during peak activity), customer support, and of course price. Here is a helpful Top 10 list of vendors to get started. You’ll want to review many providers and continuously comparison shop especially as you scale your business. Image Optimization - no surprise that visual content engages users. However, high quality imagery means larger files that eat up load time. Using resized and compressed files is a lighter lift for the server to load the image. Within imagery you’ll want to pay attention to the file format. There are four file types: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, and SVG. A general rule of thumb is to avoid GIFs since they do drag on site speed. When choosing between PNGs and JPEGs, PNGs work well for graphics and screenshots, while JPEGs are ideal for photographs. The newcomer is the SVG file format, or scalable vector graphic that renders well in web applications and across other use cases. Lazy load plugins are also useful to only render photos where the user is browsing. Reduce HTTP Requests – HTTP requests occur when the browser sends a request to the server for information. The fewer requests a website must make the faster the site can load. The amount and the size of the requested files affects load times, however most engaging sites have both multiple and larger files. The best way to address this issue and is to run a full report on your site and assess what images are taking the longest to load and if in fact you need them. After you assess what’s needed, you can reduce the file size. Web Application Optimization is a Team Effort Web application design and management is a collaborative effort between IT and marketing teams. You’ll want to consider the user experience but also look at the technical load of what you’re providing to the user. Poor site speed results in bounce rates; essentially all the work you put into an engaging interface is null and void if the load times are sluggish. It takes the unique roles and goals of each side to create a memorable experience that consistently drives conversion.
    Topics: user, website, site, web, load, dynamic, matters, performance, content, application, speed, improve.
  • Your M-Commerce Deep Dive: Data, Trends and What’s Next in the Mobile Retail Revenue World - I often find myself doing a double-take when someone refers to mobile commerce as “the next big thing.” For me…
    Topics: trends, site, mcommerce, customers, app, payment, updated, speed, online, ecommerce, commerce, page, stats, mobile.