Despite professional web companies warning online retailers to keep their websites updated, it seems that many Welsh e-retailers are losing sales due to poor website speeds.
New research, carried out by Visualsoft, which forms part of the company’s second annual e-retail performance report, reveals a trend which should set alarm bells ringing for e-commerce website owners.
Upon analysing the UK’s top 250 e-Commerce websites, they found 62% rated as ‘poor’ – taking longer than nine seconds to load on 3G – in comparison to 54% of sites that rated poor in 2017. 16% of retailers’ sites took 15 seconds or longer to load.
Analysis from Google suggests that retailers with slower websites will lose at least 32% of visitors who don\’t like waiting or shopping on slow sites. Almost 47% of customers expect a website to load in less than two seconds.
To add to this, consumers are increasingly using mobile phones and tablets to shop online. A website that is not optimised for speed on both mobile and desktop will lose sales – and for e-commerce sites in particular, consumer trust is everything.
2019 is expected to be the biggest year yet for both e-commerce and for shopping online, so it is really important that Welsh businesses don\’t neglect their website speed. Even for normal sites, slow pages can cost visitors.
These issues are typically inexpensive to fix, unless your site needs a complete re-build, and often it is simply a case of running the analysing and fixing the problem. Even where a re-build is required, this normally pays for itself in terms of increased online sales.
We are offering a free website check-up for local businesses, where we will look at page load speeds on mobile and desktop, and will also analyse your website for other current trends such as mobile friendliness and \’https\’ issues.
We\’ll then give you our recommendations for your site – and if your site is perfect already, we\’ll give you a pat on the back for being one of the 1% of e-commerce websites which were found to be \’excellent\’ in the Visualsoft research.
For more information, contact Steve or Lee on 01656 773388 or get in touch on our contact page.