Here's the deal. 

A fast website makes for better on-page experiences. 

Better on-page experiences create happy users. 

And, with ecommerce websites, happy users lead to more sales. 

Website speed is so important that 53% of mobile users totally abandon a website if it doesn't finish loading in three seconds. That's more than half of your potential customers walking out the door before they even get a good look at your products. 

In addition to impacting conversion potential, website performance is also a direct and indirect ranking factor in both mobile and desktop search results. 

This is tracked and reported through Google's Core Web Vitals metrics, namely Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Basically, better Core Web Vitals performance will lead to more engagement with your site, and Google tends to rank websites with positive engagement signals higher in search results (whether or not they admit to doing so publicly). 

Understanding Ecommerce Site Speed

In simple terms, ecommerce website speed is how long it takes to load your page in a user's browser. 

Just remember that speed is not the only force at work when determining a website's performance and how it translates to the user experience. 

To evaluate a website's performance more accurately, you need to consider the following: 

• How long it takes to finish loading the largest content section on a page (LCP)
• How long it takes for a website to respond to user interactions (INP) 
• How much a web page's layout changes while loading (CLS)

These things correspond to the Core Web Vitals metrics, which provide a more accurate representation of the user experience on a website.

Your Core Web Vitals are affected by a multitude of factors. 

For one, bandwidth is the total amount of data that can be transferred from a server to a user at any given time. The bigger your website, the more bandwidth is required to load it quickly. 

Server response time, on the other hand, measures the time it takes for a server to respond to HTTP requests. 

This has more to do with the quality of your hosting service rather than the configurations on your website. However, there are certain practices that can improve your server response times without requiring a hosting plan upgrade (more on this later). 

Finally, you have your actual web design, which includes key components like code, themes, and third-party resources. 

Since a website has a ton of moving parts, the best way to identify components that bog down loading speed is through a performance analysis tool. 

For example, if you're running a Shopify-powered store, you can easily track your Core Web Vitals using the in-app reporting feature. Just go to 'Analytics,' click 'Reports,' and look for the 'Web performance' report. 

Shopify's web performance report will give you an overview of your online store's Core Web Vitals metrics. The report also includes a few recommendations and resources to help improve your website's performance. 

If your ecommerce platform doesn't include built-in performance analytics, you can use standalone tools like PageSpeed Insights — giving you a deeper look into your Core Web Vitals metrics. 

To use PageSpeed Insights, just enter your website's URL and click 'Analyze.' 

Within seconds, PageSpeed Insights will provide you with an in-depth Core Web Vitals analysis report. This comes with a rating scale that indicates if a specific performance metric is poor, needs improvement, or is just right. 

To help improve your Core Web Vitals metrics and enhance performance, scroll down to the "Diagnostics" section. 

Here, you'll find actionable recommendations based on the detected performance-related issues on your ecommerce website, including JavaScript execution time, main thread load, and image optimization. 

Take note that the list is sorted according to potential impact on performance. Work your way from top to bottom to get substantial results faster. 

If you don't feel like PageSpeed Insights perfectly matches your needs, below are a few alternatives you should consider:

• WebPageTest
• GTmetrix
• Lighthouse
• Chrome User Experience Report
• Chrome DevTools

Improving Ecommerce Site Performance

The good news is, every single aspect of your ecommerce website's performance can be tuned and improved. 

It boils down to three things: the optimization of your website assets (e.g., scripts, images, and theme files), your hosting, and design decisions that affect your website's stability as well as responsiveness. 

Optimizing your images

Browsing an online store is a visual experience — relying on high-quality product images, demo videos, and website design elements that immerse customers into clicking the "checkout" button. 

However, media assets add to a website's bandwidth requirements. Left unoptimized, they significantly prolong the time it takes to load your online store.

One of the first things you should consider is uploading your images in next-gen formats, like AVIF and WebP. These formats use lossless compression that shrinks the file sizes of images while preserving sharpness and quality. 

Use tools like CloudConvert or TinyIMG to effortlessly convert your images into more size-efficient formats. 

Alternatively, you can use image compression extensions designed specifically for your ecommerce platform. A great example would be TinySEO, which also allows you to auto-generate optimized alt text tags and reduce oversized images. 

Optimizing your website's code

Just like images, your code assets — from CSS to JavaScript — may also slow down your ecommerce website's performance. 

But it's not just about the size of your scripts. The way you structure your code and how they're loaded also have a profound effect on your website's responsiveness, stability, and overall speed. 

The first order of business is to reduce the footprint of your code assets through a process called "code minification." 

As the name suggests, minification aims to reduce the file size of code by removing unnecessary characters and empty spaces. And the only practical way to to minify code is to use tools like JSCompress for scripts and CSS Minifier by Toptal for style sheets. 

Just paste or upload your code, run the tool, and copy the minified output. 

Note: Remember to back up your ecommerce website's code before altering them.  

In addition to code minification, it's also important to remove any unused code. 

PageSpeed Insights should be able to tell you whether or not any unused code is adding to a page's overall size. After running a performance analysis, look for the "Reduce unused JavaScript" in the diagnostics section to reveal which code to remove. 

Another code optimization strategy is to defer the loading of non-critical scripts. This tells the browser to delay the download of these scripts until all high-priority resources are fully loaded. 

To defer your non-critical scripts, just use the 'defer' attribute on your tag and you're done.

For good measure, you should also learn how to asynchronously load scripts. This involves using the 'postTask()' method, which loads scripts according to priority. 

Remember that high-priority scripts should be set as "priority: 'user-blocking'," whereas low-priority scripts should be "priority: 'background'." 

Upgrading your hosting service

Upgrading to a more capable web hosting service can give you a noticeable bump in loading speed. It may also take the least amount of work, especially if you're not switching hosting service providers. 

Understandably, a lot of new ecommerce businesses start with a shared hosting plan. This essentially means you're sharing server resources with a bunch of other websites, which can be problematic once any of the hosted sites get too resource-hungry. 

Although some shared hosting services can comfortably accommodate tens of thousands of users per month, a rule of thumb is to upgrade once you start seeing more downtimes. 

You can use a tool like UptimeRobot to monitor downtimes over time. 

Once your uptime dips below 99.95%, you know it's time to move up to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), cloud, or dedicated hosting plan. All of which offer better stability, performance, and reliability than shared hosting solutions. 

Just be sure to choose a trusted web hosting service provider with a respectable track record in terms of uptime and security. 

Some of the best options in the market are: 

• Bluehost
• InMotion Hosting
• SiteGround
• A2 Hosting
• HostArmada
• FastComet

Of course, upgrading your web hosting plan isn't necessary if you're using an ecommerce platform that comes with a scalable hosting service. 

Shopify, for example, packages all plans with unmetered hosting that can infinitely scale based on your bandwidth requirements. 

Bear in mind that another reason why Shopify's hosting is so effective is the free, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN). This significantly reduces network latency by utilizing a network of proxy servers to send cached website data to users. 

If you're running a self-hosted ecommerce website, you'll need to sign up for a CDN service yourself. Better yet, go for an edge delivery network — like Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine — to store AND process website data.

Edge delivery services also enable personalization rules, support headless integrations, and provide better content caching. 

Case Studies: Ecommerce Site Speed Improvement 

Want to see ecommerce site speed optimization in action? 

To help set your expectations and build an optimization roadmap just for you, let's examine a few companies that successfully improved their site speed (and how they did it). 

Vodafone boosts sales by 8% by improving LCP

In a case study published by web.dev, the telecommunications company Vodafone increased conversions on their ecommerce page by 8% by optimizing their Core Web Vitals — specifically targeting LCP. 

The optimizations they implemented are as follows: 

• Switched to server-side rendering to curb the impact of render-blocking JavaScript
• Optimized storefront PNG and SVG images 
• Used media queries to manage the loading of assets outside the initial viewport

The company ran an A/B test to gauge how these optimizations actually impacted their bottom line. And, sure enough, the optimized version of their page resulted in a 15% higher lead-to-visit rate, an 11% increase in cart-to-visit rate, and 8% more sales. 

RIFRUF gets 8% higher conversion rate with Nostra AI

In this next case study, dog sneaker company RIFRUF increased their conversion rate by 8% without getting their hands dirty. 

It's important to note that RIFRUF's strategy revolves around rich content experiences. That is achieved through a mix of informative pop-ups, videos, and blog content. 

With Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine, RIFRUF's Time To First Byte (TTFB) metric — directly linked to LCP and FCP — was reduced from 390 milliseconds to just 45 milliseconds. As a result, customers were able to get the full RIFRUF content experience without contending with longer load times. 

This vastly boosted user engagement, which resulted in 8% higher conversions. 

Other ecommerce performance case studies

Check out other case studies about ecommerce site performance optimizations that directly contributed to business goals: 

• Nood increases conversion rate by 24% by reducing TTFB 
• Beachwaver doubles sales by improving initial load time by 345 milliseconds
• eBay gets 0.5% more "add-to-cart" clicks with every 100-millisecond improvement in load time

Future Trends in Ecommerce Site Speed and Performance

Before we wrap things up, let's take a quick look at what's ahead for site performance and its relevance in ecommerce. 

Perhaps the biggest issue at hand is the continued dominance of mobile traffic share in the ecommerce space. 

While 77% of ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices, a lot of brands still haven't prioritized smartphones and tablets in their performance optimization efforts.  

According to a study by Tooltester, most web pages are 70% slower on mobile devices than desktops. This presents a huge opportunity for you to pull ahead of the competition by targeting site performance optimization on mobile devices. 

Remember, mobile users exhibit an ever-growing preference for media-rich experiences — from short-form videos to mobile shopping apps. The more you keep up with the demand for rich content, the more challenging it gets to implement traditional performance optimization strategies (e.g., code optimization and image compression). 

That's why headless commerce is breaking out faster than ever. By decoupling the frontend and backend of your ecommerce platform, it's easier to build omnichannel experiences while preserving buttery-smooth performance. 

How Nostra AI can Help with Site Speed for Ecommerce

No matter how much content you pack into your ecommerce website, strategies that optimize the delivery of website data to users will always be an efficient and cost-effective approach. 

That's where we come in. 

With Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine, you can attain huge performance gains without breaking a sweat — regardless of how large or complex your ecommerce website stands. 

Learn how easy it is by booking a demo here.