Podcast Interview on Socials: How Website Speed Affects Business

I was delighted to be a guest on the Socials podcast. The team does an excellent job mapping the Czech online marketing landscape, especially in e-commerce.

We talked about website speed, as expected. This time, however, the focus was on its impact on marketing and business websites. Naturally, we also delved into the numbers we've measured and provided very concrete tips on handling speed.

If you run a website or do marketing for multiple sites, this content should (hopefully!) be of interest to you. In the following text, we've highlighted the best of what was discussed in the podcast.

How Does Website Speed Affect Customer Behavior and Conversions?#

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• “Speed is a technically measurable part of UX.”
• Speed, for most websites (especially e-shops), correlates with conversions.
• The most crucial metric for most is LCP, although it can differ for each e-shop.
• The optimal loading speed (LCP) is within 2.5 seconds; the fastest Czech e-shop, iWant.cz, achieves this in 0.8 seconds.
• For one large e-shop, we measured that at a loading speed of around 2 seconds, conversions were six times higher compared to a 4-second load time. We can measure this in our speed impact analysis.

When Is It Worth Investing in Website Speed?#

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• Gen Z's patience with loading is on another level; they expect immediate reaction.
• How do boxed solutions like Shoptet, Upgates, Shopify fare? Generally very well, with problems often arising with customizations. It's the same with WordPress.

Recommended Platforms for Fast E-shops#

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• From a speed perspective, the platform doesn't matter much, but beware of customizations and developers.
• On Shoptet, custom modifications are often of poor quality.
• Developers are often interested in speed but either don't have the time or lack the knowledge, resulting in changes that don't enhance speed.
• With WordPress, beware of speed plugins like WP Rocket, which often cheat the Lighthouse score.

What Commonly Slows Down E-commerce Websites?#

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• Often, the issue begins with the measurement of the website itself. Don't focus on the Lighthouse score.
• If you want a single number, look at the SPS score.
• Essentially, speed optimization is about removing files that download but aren't needed by the user.
• What slows down e-shops? Do we really need to download all JS files? Are images in WebP, AVIF? Videos, on the other hand, might not be a problem.

How to Optimize Speed Without Compromising UX?#

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• In terms of web design or UX, it's not so much about restriction. Implementation is key.
• Another issue can be analytics or generally third parties.
• Developers often unnecessarily optimize GA/GTM, resulting in data loss for the website.
• Previously, the main problem was in the developers' code, but today, due to the INP interactivity metric, we must also optimize GTM.
• Problematic examples include Hotjar and generally heatmaps or cookie consents and their poor implementation.

Who Should Be Responsible for Website Speed in a Company?#

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• It's crucial that someone is actually responsible for speed. This is not yet common practice.
• Speed sits between marketing, UX, and development.
• Typically, developers are in charge, overseen by the CTO.

What to Measure and Which Tools to Use?#

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• How to measure speed? PageSpeed Insights are good, but daily monitoring is ideal, as seen in our monitoring PLUS.
• Our monitoring includes intelligent notifications thanks to the Watchdog, which filters false positives.
• The most important metrics are Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, and CLS.
• Anyone touching the website can affect its speed, hence the need for continuous measurement.
• Performance Culture = educating people in the company about speed.

How to Manage Website Speed During Major Campaigns?#

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• The basics are having availability monitoring and speed monitoring.
• It's very beneficial to have a CDN proxy like Cloudflare ready.

Major Technical Adjustments for Core Web Vitals#

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• Is it possible that we won't need to worry about speed in the future as the internet and devices get faster? Unfortunately, that's not the case.
• The first problem is the disparity between low-end and high-end devices, known as the Performance Inequality Gap.
• Another issue is that new technologies have long improved DX (Developer Experience) but not user speed.
• However, people's expectation is for a website to load practically instantaneously.

How to Ensure Cooperation Between Marketing and Development?#

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• For optimizing website speed, it's crucial to liaise with development, analytics, marketing, and other departments in larger companies.
• At PageSpeed.ONE, we are friends with developers and treat them well. :-)

If the podcast piqued your interest in speed, here are a few ways to continue:

• Sign up and test your website in our tester.
• Subscribe to our newsletter.
• Follow us on social media: X, LinkedIn, Facebook.

Thanks to the folks at Socials for the invitation and professional work, which stands among the best in Czech professional podcasts!

Tags:Podcast