Skip to Main Content
speed in Mobile
Performance

A Complete Guide to Website Speed in Mobile Commerce Success

In today’s mobile commerce landscape, website speed moves the needle.

YOTTAA’s work with over 1,500 retail customers have repeatedly shown a direct link between website load times and customer acquisition. Slow-loading websites increase bounce rates and abandoned shopping carts, reducing revenue. It’s crucial to check website performance on a regular basis – and with the vast majority of shoppers navigating to your site from their mobile devices, even more critical to understand the impact of a slow site on the mobile shopper.

Understanding Mobile Commerce (mCommerce)

Consumers are doing more of their daily work and play from their mobile devices, including their shopping. As mobile banking grows and huge brands’ purchase and develop shopping apps, eCommerce has been adapting to incorporate mCommerce, and deliver mobile-friendly shopping experiences. The significance of mCommerce is evident in the rising number of mobile shoppers, with a growing share of online sales coming from mobile phones.

The Salesforce shopping index tracks all the online purchases made through the salesforce eCommerce platform. According to this data, mobile remains the biggest traffic driver and preferred channel for placing orders, with shares of 76% and 65% respectively.

[Source: Salesforce]

To succeed in 2024 and beyond, eCommerce teams and specialists must recognize mCommerce’s importance in the digital world. Today, developers, UX, and UI teams at every successful eComm company must prioritize mobile-friendly websites. In this blog, we‘ll cover how to optimize your mobile storefront for efficiency, speed, and mCommerce trends.

The Impact of Page Speed on Mobile Commerce

mCommerce success depends on website page speed. Slow websites hurt user experience and sales – numerous studies show that a few seconds delay in page load time greatly increase bounce rates. Slow-loading sites will be left by mobile visitors, who are even more unforgiving.

To avoid this, you must run page speed tests – tools that measure performance and check website speed. These tests, which examine several factors that affect page loading speed, can provide site administrators with crucial and valuable insights.

Key Metrics for Website Speed

 Page speed tests typically focus on these fundamental key metrics: 

  1. Page Load Times – This metric is a crucial part of a website performance test. It measures a browser’s page load time. It covers the time needed to retrieve and render HTML, CSS, JavaScript, pictures, and other page resources.
  2. Time to Interactive (TTI) – TTI evaluates if and when a website is completely interactive in response to user actions like button clicks and form submissions. User engagement speed is crucial to website evaluation.
  3. First Contentful Paint (FCP) – FCP tracks the time it takes for content to appear on the screen, be it text or a picture. . It’s vital to user-centric metrics since it shows when consumers see valuable content.
  4. Total Blocking Time (TBT) – TBT monitors how long-running tasks block a web page’s main thread. High TBT slows user experience.
  5. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – LCP assesses how long the screen’s biggest and most important element takes to fully load. This statistic affects user experience and visual stability.
  6. Requests and Page Size – These metrics count HTTP requests and the size of all resources (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, pictures) needed to load a page. Reduce these and you’ll speed load times.
  7. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – CLS analyzes web page visual stability by gauging how much page content shifts during loading. Low CLS scores mean your site is user-friendly and has better UX.
  8. Mobile vs. Desktop Performance – Mobile users have variable connection speeds and device capabilities. It’s essential to evaluate page speed separately for mobile and desktop.

How to Analyze Website Page Speed

Best Tools to Test Website Speed

There are many tools available to help you conduct a website speed test and understand how your page speed lines up with best practices. Here are some of the most popular and efficient options:

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google pagespeed insights is a free-to-use tool that implements real data from chrome users, giving you insights into how your actual visitors experience your website.

GTmetrix

One of the most popular tools, GTmetrix provides specific, prioritized recommendations for improving your website’s performance. It also has a free and a paid version.

Lighthouse

Free and open source, lighthouse provides separate scores for mobile and desktop performance, helping you optimize for different devices.

WebPagetest

WebPagetest has a free version for basic testing, but it also provides paid plans for more advanced features, scripting, and the ability to run tests from private instances.

Pingdom

With Pingdom speed test, you can access lab data to simulate how your page performs under different conditions, aiding in development and optimization.

How To Test Website Speed: Two Examples 

Here is a short tutorial on how to conduct a website speed test on two of the speed tools we listed above, Google Page Speed and GTmetrix.

How to Run A Speed Test Using Page Speed Insights

  1. Visit the Page Speed Insights website at developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights.
  2. Enter the website URL you want to analyze.
  3. Initiate the Analysis: Click the “Analyze” button to start the analysis.
  4. Review the Results: Mobile and desktop performance scores are available from Page Speed Insights. It provides in-depth website performance analysis and optimization ideas. Consider user-centric metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Act on recommendations to improve your website’s speed and performance.  

How To Run A Speed Test Using GTmetrix

  1. Visit GTmetrix and enter the URL of the website you want to test.
  2. Click the “Test your site” button on the homepage to begin the analysis.
  3. Review the Results: GTmetrix provides performance reports with PageSpeed and YSlow ratings. Check Total Page Size, Requests, and Loading Times.
  4. Analyze Recommendations: GTmetrix provides particular website performance suggestions. Optimize pictures, enable browser caching, and use CDNs. Act on the recommendations to enhance your website’s speed and performance.


Optimize Your Website for Speed

Once you’ve used a tool like GTmetrix or Google Page Speed Test to conduct your site speed test and understand your site speed, there are plenty of optimizations you can make to your website to make it run faster and more smoothly. Here are a few suggestions from the experts at YOTTAA:

  1. Image optimization – compress and resize images without compromising quality. Use modern image formats like WebP and lazy loading to reduce image-related load times.
  2. Minimizing HTTP requests – Combining CSS and JavaScript files, using CSS sprites for icons, and simplifying web page design reduce HTTP requests. This reduces server requests and loads faster
  3. Browser caching – Implement browser caching stores static resources like CSS, JavaScript, and pictures on a user’s device. This way returning visitors don’t need to re-download the same resources, therefore load times are faster.
  4. Leverage Content delivery networks (CDNs) – Distribute website content to global servers using CDNs. By providing material from a nearby server, latency is reduced, improving load times.

Keep Up with eCommerce Trends for 2024  

Using the speed tests and site optimizations suggested above, you’re ready to get your site running faster to meet the needs of the modern shopper. But new technology continually emerges to create advanced online shopping experiences. We dive into the impact of these growing online shopping trends in our mCommerce best practices eBook. Here’s a brief overview: 

  1. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) – AR and VR are transforming the eCommerce experience by bridging the gap between physical and virtual shopping.
  2. Artificial intelligence and machine learning – AI and machine learning technologies have enabled companies to provide hyper-personalized online shopping based on a trove of customer data.
  3. New Payment Methods – Mobile digital wallets have empowered consumers to leave their credit cards at home and only purchase with their mobile phones.
  4. Voice Commerce – eCommerce businesses will optimize their platforms for voice search and shopping to accommodate this emerging trend.
  5. Omnichannel Shopping – eCommerce will need to adapt to offer a consistent customer journey across various channels, including physical stores, mobile apps, and websites.

YOTTAA’s Solution to Improve Site Speed for mCommerce and eCommerce Sites

At YOTTAA, we help thousands of eCommerce teams and marketers optimize their websites to meet the needs of today’s online shoppers. Here are the “must-haves” for a standout mCommerce experience (which we cover in more detail in this ebook)

  1. Application Sequencing – Mobile users may have different screen resolutions or network capabilities. Profiles can be built to load applications differently according to the context. Dynamic Sequencing allows tags to be assigned for different priority groups to accommodate key vendor solutions such as analytics beacons or personalization tags.
  2. Mobile-First UX Design – A mobile-first shopping experience includes several specific UX design considerations, like mobile iconography and notifications, according to UX expert Miklos Philips.
  3. Mobile Reporting – Key metrics like volume and percentage of visitors, core web vitals, page load times, errors and more should be viewable by different device. YOTTAA’ s Real User Monitoring (RUM) shows users’ site visit experience as they interact with the website or application and can be filtered for mobile and tablet users.

Prioritize Page Speed for mCommerce Success 

A website that operates quickly and seamlessly is critical for mCommerce success. Faster load times translate into higher conversion rates. For eCommerce professionals, prioritizing speed and a better mobile shopping experience is non-negotiable. To thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of 2024, optimize your website’s speed, and watch your mCommerce conversions go up and to the right.

Download Yotta’s eBook for more mCommerce tips.