Speed is Revenue: How Website Performance Directly Impacts eCommerce Sales

This blog was originally published on Medium.com on August 4, 2023.

For today’s digital businesses, fast website performance is no longer optional — it’s a competitive necessity. With impatient users and rivals just a click away, sluggish and clumsy experiences drive customers to leave. Conversions plummet. Revenue is lost.

Extensive research confirms the tangible connection between site performance and bottom-line business metrics:

• Conversion rates are 3x higher on sites loading in just 1 second compared to those requiring 5 seconds. (Portend Study 2022)
• Almost 70% of consumers indicate that page speed affects their likeliness to buy (Unbounce Study, 2018).
• 0.1s site speed improvement leads to 8.4% conversion rate increase, an increase in average order value of 9.2%.(Deloitte study, 2020).
• 50% of visitors abandon a website if it takes more than 6 seconds to load (Digital.com Survey, 2022).

The data is clear. Website speed demonstrably impacts conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and revenues. Users demand near-instant page loads and seamless browsing. Lagging on speed is no longer an option if you want to attract and retain customers.

So what constitutes a fast experience in today’s multi-device web? Here are a few key metrics:

• Page load times under 2 seconds (Google quote, Blue Corona Blog, 2019)
• Time to first byte under 1 second (Web.dev, 2022)
• Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds (Web.dev, 2023)
• First Input Delay under 100 milliseconds (Web.dev, 2023)

Achieving these speed benchmarks consistently across desktop and mobile is the new baseline to please customers. Of course, actually delivering these ambitious performance targets at scale is far easier said than done, especially for large eCommerce enterprises.

The mobile imperative

With mobile now responsible for over 53% of web traffic (Oberlo, 2023) and 65% of online sales (Statistica, 2022) optimizing the mobile experience has become imperative. However, poor mobile performance remains rampant:

• As page load increases from 1s to 3s, bounce rates can increase 32% (GoogleThink research, 2017).
• A majority (53%) of people who shop online want e-commerce websites to load within 3 seconds or faster (Digital.com Survey, 2022).
• Conversions can fall by up to 20% for every second delay in mobile page load (SOASTA Study, 2017).
• For 20% of online shoppers, slow page loads rank as the #1 frustration (Digital.com Survey, 2022).

These stark numbers reveal the zero tolerance users have for sluggish mobile performance. Even minor delays lead to astronomical abandonment rates.

Brands failing to accelerate mobile load times and provide a seamless user experience will hemorrhage customers to faster competitors. Only a 0.1 mobile site speed increase resulted in 10.1% increase in conversions with travel consumers (Deloitte study, 2020). Investing in mobile performance pays dividends.

Taming enterprise-scale complexity

For large eCommerce enterprises, getting site speed under control is massively difficult. Their complex digital footprint presents roadblock upon roadblock:

Photo by André Bandarra on Unsplash

• Uncoordinated Efforts — Distributed teams and fragmented systems lead to siloed, disjointed optimization efforts that often work at cross purposes. Strategic coordination is essential, but difficult.
• Ad Hoc Monitoring — Without holistic performance monitoring, many issues go undetected until customers complain. Teams are constantly reacting instead of being proactive.
• Release Velocity Pressure — New capabilities must be balanced with speed needs, but pressure to ship features quickly often overrides performance considerations.
• Legacy Tech Constraints — Old monolithic stacks like .NET and Java slow velocity. Technical debt and outdated architectures hamper modernization.
• Code Bloat — Integration sprawl has bloated code with duplicate libraries, unnecessary trackers, etc., bogging down pages. But cleaning up requires significant resources.
• Diagnosis Difficulties — Pinpointing exact optimization opportunities within massive, complex codebases involves extensive, iterative profiling — a difficult and slow process.
• Scaling Challenges — Traffic spikes easily overwhelm systems. Reacting to demand with more infrastructure leads to runaway cloud costs over time.

These intertwined challenges make achieving consistently excellent speeds at scale an elusive goal. The complexity of continuously optimizing performance across a huge digital footprint taxes engineering teams to their limits. More efficient solutions are required.

Automated proxies: a scalable solution

To drive dramatic speed improvements across massive sites, leading brands now leverage automated performance proxy services. These intermediary proxies sit transparently between CDNs and origin infrastructure to dynamically optimize pages and assets on-the-fly before delivery.

Here are some key capabilities automated performance proxies provide:

• AI-driven optimization — Machine learning automatically applies performance best practices tailored to each site and audience. A/B testing continually experiments to tune techniques based on traffic patterns.
• Holistic monitoring — Full-site tracking detects performance regressions rapidly via actionable alerts when KPIs degrade. Teams gain visibility to stay ahead of issues.
• Edge processing — Heavier optimizations like minification and compression are handled at the proxy edge, before requests reach origin. This reduces origin load substantially.
• Universal acceleration — Proxies work seamlessly with existing infrastructure and apps. No invasive software installs or architectural changes needed to realize benefits.
• Rapid adoption — Proxies are implemented by deploying a simple JavaScript snippet. Acceleration requires zero complex configurations or coding.

By leveraging automated performance proxies, engineering teams no longer bear the never-ending burden of playing catch-up on speed issues. Proxies take over the challenge of continuously diagnosing opportunities and iteratively improving performance.

The outcome? Lightning fast experiences without costly re-platforming or losing velocity on revenue-driving capabilities. Proxy-driven optimization finally makes consistently stellar site speed at scale achievable.

PhotonIQ Performance Proxy (P3)

As we’ve explored, achieving lightning fast performance at scale remains enormously difficult for enterprise eCommerce brands. Thankfully, solutions exist like PhotonIQ Performance Proxy (P3) to tame even the most complex performance challenges.

Purpose-built for eCommerce, P3 is an AI-driven proxy service that sits between CDNs and origin to optimize pages and assets on-the-fly. Running on Macrometa’s Global Data Network (GDN) of edge nodes, P3 accelerates your site transparently without any changes to code.

Here are 3 key features that make PhotonIQ the leading performance proxy for global enterprises:

1. AI-powered dynamic performance optimization

P3’s core optimization engine uses advanced AI to dynamically improve page performance. As traffic patterns change, P3’s machine learning algorithms continuously tune and customize optimizations to each site.

P3 handles performance best practices like compressing images, minifying code, prefetching assets, and lazy loading components automatically on-the-fly. The AI does the heavy lifting so engineering teams don’t have to.

2. Edge Side Tagging

P3 offers Edge Side Tagging to execute JavaScript tags at the edge instead of in the end user’s browser. This prevents page bloat.

Marketers can still leverage all their analytics, personalization, and other tags without impacting performance. Offloading tag processing minimizes payload size and speeds up page loads.

With Edge Side Tagging, tags load asynchronously after content is rendered. This prevents tags from blocking page rendering and improves Core Vitals scores.

3. Edge-rendering for SEO

To unlock SEO for modern JavaScript sites, P3 includes dynamic prerendering. This prerenders pages as static HTML at the edge for crawler indexing.

Now search engines can discover content from React, Vue, and Angular sites. P3 edge-rendering happens transparently without changes to application code.

This also accelerates the first paint speed. Users get a static shell instantly while dynamic content loads behind the scenes.

Dramatic performance made easy

With these capabilities, PhotonIQ streamlines site acceleration without ongoing software maintenance or performance monitoring needed by engineering teams. P3 integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure — no changes required. The globally distributed proxy layer handles optimization instantly and automatically.

Leading enterprises leverage P3 to improve site speed by up to 70% and achieve 90+ Lighthouse scores. Core Web Vitals see similar dramatic jumps into the green across all pages. Slow, bloated sites become lightning fast.

The bottom line

In today’s hyper-competitive digital landscape, fast website performance has become a competitive necessity for eCommerce success. Failing to match or exceed rivals’ speed is no longer an option.

However, optimizing complex enterprise eCommerce sites at scale remains extremely difficult. Thankfully, advanced automated performance proxies now offer a compelling solution. By dynamically accelerating site delivery, proxies empower brands to finally achieve excellent speed consistently across their digital presence.

The revenue impact makes investing in proxies well worthwhile. Leaders looking to modernize their customer experience and compete on satisfaction are adopting proxies rapidly. With technology constantly evolving, the stakes for performance have never been higher. Performance proxies represent a strategic asset to excel today and thrive tomorrow.

Ready to accelerate?

If you manage a complex eCommerce site struggling with performance, PhotonIQ is purpose-built to help. The AI-powered P3 proxy optimizes your site for you, delivering dramatic speed gains instantly.

To learn more about P3, schedule an appointment to chat with a solutions expert. The future of speedy eCommerce experiences is here. Accelerate your site today.