How fast hosting drives higher conversions

It is no unknown fact that the speed of an online shop is incredibly important for boosting conversion rates. Traditional retail has struggled incredibly to keep up since the rise of e-commerce. Lower prices, a larger assortment but most importantly, the speed of the entire shopping experience.

How fast is fast?

Back in 2009, a study by
Akamai
that online consumers use two seconds as an acceptable loading time for a Web page. That two-second limit is still used today, and many organizations appear to be struggling to score below it.

For example, MeasureWorks recently conducted its 6th consecutive year of retail100 and travel30 speed research, commissioned by Twinkle. The charts below are from
MeasureWorks
and give you insight into the top 10. Looking at both categories, only 5 organizations scored below 2 seconds in terms of performance. So only 3.8% of the 130 top e-commerce organizations in the Netherlands (based on revenue) score well.

The relationship between speed and conversion

The speed of an online store has a major impact on the final conversion rate. Simply put: if your webshop is too slow, you will lose customers. Some real-life figures:

• 
  Walmart.com
  has found that every second their platform loads faster, conversion increases by 2%.
• 
  Firefox
  accelerated their website load time by 2.2 seconds, resulting in 15.4% more downloads of their browser. With an average of 275,000 visitors per day, this represents an increase of 10 million downloads per year.
• Car parts platform
  AutoAnything.com
  halved loading time, resulting in a 9% conversion increase.

Measuring = knowing

Of course, you want to make your own platform as successful as possible. The faster, the more conversion. Then you will have to start by analyzing the current situation. Via the website of
Pingdom
you have the ability to run a test from various locations around the world. That way, you can discover how much time it takes for your website or online store to fully load. You can then use the report that is created when optimizing. You can see exactly where the pain points are and where you can improve.

As described above, you have the option to run the test from multiple locations. If you operate internationally, it is important that your website or web shop has a good load time not only in the Netherlands, but also in the other countries in which you operate. In that case, consider using a “Content Delivery Network” (CDN). Using a CDN, you can make use of multiple servers spread across different locations around the world. On each server, your website or web shop is cached and converted into static content. The website or web shop is made accessible to the visitor via the nearest server. The smaller the distance from the server, the faster the pages are displayed.

Support from your hosting provider

Small web shops in particular need the resources we offer them through our
web hosting packages
. Continuous optimization of your website or webshop (use Pingdom, for example, for constant analysis) will get you a long way. If you also want to have the underlying infrastructure of your website or webshop tweaked to go for the absolute best performance, we advise you to contact
Cyso
, also the organization behind ‘SQR.NL’. Cyso specializes in customization and realizes this for large e-commerce organizations, such as
The Sting
.