
Website Speed, Revenue and Employee Productivity
Flowers for Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day is the second biggest day each year for flowers according to AboutFlowers. (The December holidays bring higher florist sales). With Mother’s day being on a Sunday, I suspect that most of us order flowers while at the office or on a break from work during the days before Mother’s Day.
Website Speed Is Important
With website speed being well-known as a key factor in driving both Web-based revenue and loyalty I thought this would make the perfect benchmark. Faster websites drive increases in sales, pages viewed, and lower bounce rates. There is much research and study that proves these truths – including some interesting stats from Shopzilla. They succeeded in reducing the loading time from 7 down to 2 seconds for their website and saw their conversion rate increase by 7-12%. With their volume, I am sure that is a lot of revenue. With floral websites, a slower website may mean a competitor will win the sale or the more expensive flower options may be viewed. Time is money ? and in this case, it works both ways. For me, time spent waiting for a slow website is lost productivity at work, and for the e-commerce website – a slow website will result in lower sales.
The Benchmark
For this benchmark survey, I looked at the following websites: Proflowers, 1800Flowers, Teleflora, and FTD. The first aspect of this benchmark I would like to call out is that these websites are all slow and below average compared to all websites. Look at the chart below where you can see the Yottaa score for each website from 4/27 – 5/9, 2011.
The chart here shows the Yottaa Score. The Yottaa Score is the exclusive value we give for an overall web performance assessment. We realized that one timing metric alone is not sufficient to judge web page performance. We developed the Yottaa Score for this purpose. To learn more about the Yottaa score visit the Yottaa Insight web performance monitoring page.
In Summary:
These four e-commerce websites remained consistent in their website performance through their second busiest period in the year. They all however are below average, with each of them taking longer than five seconds to load in a web browser and be available to navigate as a user. With the competition in this category fierce, there clearly is an opportunity for one of these websites to improve its performance and take a greater percentage of sales. I look forward to checking back in on this Yottaa Insight benchmark next year to see if any of these websites have increased their website speed.