Page speed is a concept used for the time between loading your website enough (or completely) to present content in front of the user and the first browser request being sent to the app server. So, is your website or your project strong enough in terms of page speed score? How do the page speed rates of e-commerce sites affect the purchasing behavior of the visitors?
As you know, digital marketing is not just about the power of the slogans you put there on virtual billboards. A strong SEO strategy also requires what only a powerful digital marketing agency can do: That is, for a strong SEO strategy, you need to take the control of the speed of the pages.
How Does Load Speed Affects Customer Behavior?
There is a lot you can do to shape customer behavior as an e-commerce platform. The first of these is, of course, increasing conversion rates by ensuring that the time users spend on your website offer higher UX.
Unbounce revealed an interesting fact about conversion rates on e-commerce sites with its research published in 2019. The details of the work say the following:
Slow pages can interrupt shopping and reduce trust, but the size of the effect varies by audience, device, and checkout flow. Use Core Web Vitals together with your own conversion and abandonment data instead of applying an old aggregate percentage.
A Brief Introduction to the World of Psychology: Consumer Psychology
So, what exactly is the next behavior of users who decide not to buy a product from you due to your poor performance in page speed or who say they will not visit your site again? Let’s explore this together.
Users may retry or leave when a page provides no useful feedback. Measure real-user performance and make the first meaningful content visible promptly rather than relying on a universal waiting-time rule.
- According to the most recent studies, after a 3-second waiting period, 22 percent of users prefer to close the tab directly.
- 14 percent of users visit another website that they estimate has a higher page speed than that site.
Are you aware of how big these rates are?
What does brand prestige and UX says about page speed?
User psychology studies say that a user’s connection with the brand also depends on the prestige the brand creates. Well, does page speed give information about the prestige of a brand?
Let’s say it right: Page speed creates a user’s impression of the brand’s professionalism and strong power that adapts to the digital world. If this impression is not strong enough, it may create the perception that the site is not competent enough in other digital services. Indeed, the fact that users prefer not to shop from sites with low page speed performance is not only due to the instant difficulty of shopping, but also a perceptual change.
Current Researches About Page Speed and Buying Behavior
Getting a user to buy the product after adding it to the cart requires very strong marketing efforts.
According to a Radware case study, approximately seventy percent of users who add products to their cart on e-commerce sites leave the site before completing the purchase by making a payment. Of course, there could be many reasons for this. High prices, high shipping costs are some of these reasons. But a recent study reveals that the majority of users in the US and UK are affected by slow loading times in delaying purchasing behavior by dropping items in the cart.
- According to an online shopping survey in the UK, 67 percent of users stop shopping because of the low page speed score on the website.
- This rate is 51 percent for users in the USA.
So, while managing strong marketing processes, it is vital for brands to maintain performance metrics such as page speed, with the strongest results.
In the above research, you see a bounce rate statistic that includes those who have a fast experience, those who have a slow experience on the first page, and those who have a slow experience on the third page. Here the delay is designated as two seconds. Even that two-second delay was enough for the second group to show a 67 percent bounce, which is a really high number.
Screpy allows you to track all of your performance metrics on a regular basis and creates tasks that will help you solve them by identifying all the problems that cause score drops in these metrics. In this way, more comprehensive and powerful results are obtained.
What To Do To Rocket Your E-Commerce Site?
If you are the owner of an e-commerce site or if you are doing SEO consultancy on such a site, there are many improvements you can choose to make after you follow up regularly through Screpy. Review the recommendations submitted as tasks on the panel. But you can take a look at a few possible problems that we will present for you here too!
- Do users have to visit multiple pages to go to the purchase while on your e-commerce site? The discovery of the “Buy now” button on e-commerce sites came after it is realized that more pages mean more time to ‘’waiting for loading’’. Every step that users get between their purchases and the product means more moments in which they become even closer to abandoning their purchase. To prevent this, giant e-commerce platforms such as Amazon are now trying to reduce the steps between the page where the products are reviewed and the page where they are purchased by adding “Buy Now” buttons.
A faster server response can reduce the time before rendering begins, but it does not guarantee the complete loading experience or a business outcome. Measure TTFB in field and lab data, then optimize application work, caching, database queries, network latency, and CDN configuration as appropriate.
- Page Speed and User Experience (UX): How to Impress Your Visitors
- Best SEO Techniques for E-Commerce Sites
- E-Commerce UX Best Practices – 2021 Updated Tips
- Page Speed and Conversion Rates: The Effect of UX
- Why does the site load time matter?
Primary sources and further reading
- Web Vitals
- Lighthouse performance documentation
- JavaScript SEO basics
- Google Analytics 4 documentation
Method and limitations
This guide is a practical review framework, not a controlled experiment or a guarantee of rankings. Record the tested URL, date, device or market, baseline output, exact change, and post-change result. Validate material recommendations against the current primary documentation and test risky changes on a staging site first.
Verification checklist
| Check | Evidence to record |
|---|---|
| Baseline | URL, date, device or market, and current metric or output |
| Change | Exact action, configuration, and environment |
| Outcome | Re-run the same check and compare the result and limitations |