Being an Online Seller (Shopify Merchant) gives you access to an easy-to-use E-commerce platform that requires no coding skills and will have you ready to sell in the market in no time.
Having said that, the E-commerce world is now fast becoming competitive.
The problem: In today’s day and age, having a simple E-commerce store is not enough. The site needs to be Optimized in order to hold on to the traffic that bounces from one store to another trying to get the best deal.
What is Website Speed Optimization?
Optimization is the process of tuning your Shopify store for better performance. Monitor key aspects like your website’s speed, conversion rate, and bounce rate to determine what elements of your Shopify store need improvement.
Having an Optimized Site means getting more and more traffic. In the digital realm, customers are always checking out the competitor for better deals, so the more the traffic, the higher the chances of sales.
For this reason, below, we mention 8 reasons why it’s so important to Optimize Shopify Website Speed and what happens without it:
→ No Customers if no On-Page Optimization
On-page SEO (or on-site SEO) is the practice of optimizing web pages with specific keywords in order to improve search visibility and traffic. This involves aligning page-specific elements like title tags, headings, content, and internal links with keywords so you show up on a customer’s search index.
Without SEO, your site won’t even rank on any search engines. This is an immediate requirement.
→ Loss of the Few Arriving Customers if No Speed Optimization
Keep your website loading within 3 seconds. This is the new threshold for customers’ patience. Anything more than 3 seconds and your customer will bounce to a different site. 40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site.
After all, the site was built for customers to visit in the first place! Right?
→ Customer faces Bad User Experience
Without Optimizing your site, customers are left looking for the right buttons. That means after a while, customers bounce to your competitor’s site to get what they are looking for. The customer leaves feeling neglected and will consider your website fraudulent. The customer is probably lost forever.
→ This causes More Abandoned Cart
As customers cant find the right button, they are unable to check out their items and thus leave your site with the items still in the cart. This customer was one click away from processing a sale!
→ The Competitor Benefits from Your Lack of Interest
Since you didn’t find it important to Optimize your website, the customer goes to your competitor’s site to get their product. Hence, your competitor wins as you didn’t find Optimizing your site a priority.
→ All Your Marketing Effort and Money Spent is Now Lost
If your website is not Optimized, it makes no sense to do any kind of marketing as the customers visit, only be lost in your site not being able to find products or the checkout process. All money spent on marketing is lost.
→ Optimize your Images Or Risk Slowing Down your Site
Images take a good time to load. Optimize your images so that your Website loads as fast as possible.
Without resizing images to fit your webpage, loading time is increased as the site is trying to fit your image correctly while the customer waits for the website to load.
→ And lastly, Customers Leave As your Site is Not Mobile Ready
Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking first. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Google primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward. Not being mobile-ready means zooming in and out of your page on a mobile to fit or read the page. This will always frustrate the customer ultimately resulting in the customer bouncing.
Search Engine Optimization and Website Speed Optimization is one of the most important considerations for all E-commerce sellers who aim for online success from an SEO perspective.
When you as a seller have invested so heavily in a Website, it won’t cost much to keep it Optimized.