No matter how engaging your site is, it’s inutile if shoppers leave before it even has a chance to load. Customers won’t wait more than three seconds — that’s how crucial site speed is to your conversion.
In fact, a study by Portent showed that the first 5 seconds have the highest impact on conversion rates. The same study showed that the highest e-commerce conversion rates occur with load times between 0 to 2 seconds. Also, with each additional second of load time, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%.
To test the page speed of your site, you can use tools like Page Speed Insights to get a report on your website performance (both desktop and mobile). If you notice that your online store is taking a while to load, you should:
Find out what’s causing the delay
Page speed can be affected by a variety of factors — user behaviour, file sizes, file formats, website servers, broken codes, and incompatible plugins.
To eliminate the guesswork of what the root cause is, use page speed tools (like the one we mentioned above). These tools give you insight into where and how you can make changes, helping you identify key improvement areas.
Recheck the theme
There is a possibility that the theme you chose might be causing slow loading times. If you’ve recently changed your theme, restore your backup and check if the issue persists.
A good rule of thumb is to use themes that are less clunky — those with lesser codes.
Switch to a better host
More often than not, your hosting provider could be the one causing the issue. It’s advisable not to have a shared or free web hosting for your e-commerce store. Saving on hosting is not an option as you need a dedicated, scalable host for your online store.