Why Performance Optimization helps e-commerce sites increase traffic and get more revenue

There’s no doubt that the e-commerce market is getting increasingly competitive in South East Asia as we head into 2019’s peak season. November and December are both do-or-die months for so many sites in terms of their KPIs, especially when you have little margin to make up for any disappointing sales.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the path to revenue is not always about big marketing campaigns, killer offers or even product exclusivity. Often, some basic UX housekeeping helps in that too. As many marketeers already know, an oft-cited Google research study shows that if mobile sites experience greater load times than three seconds, they lose 53% of their visitors. The potential for lost revenue is very real in this scenario so why even risk such unnecessary churn?

The reality is that e-commerce sites can prevent this without taking on additional in-house effort. Recently, Dexecure was approached by Indonesian luxury e-commerce brand Bobobobo to provide a website performance optimization solution to replace their existing in-house tools. Given the varied user experiences on a multitude of screen sizes and connection types, it would be tedious for the client to keep this up themselves.

The clients already saw a sizeable reduction of their website size during the POC stages, noting that this would also help reduce their CDN bill. Almost all major sites engage a CDN partner to facilitate faster website delivery across geographical regions. This is done by caching website pages on servers owned by the CDN itself. A CDN typically charges by the amount of requests served to end users and this is measured by a price per gigabyte (GB). With Dexecure already reducing the size of the website, the number of GB used was far lower.

After three months, we checked back on our client and were delighted to learn of the results. Not only did we see their website load almost 20% faster compared to before, Bobobobo had reported a 15% increase in conversion rates that resulted in 8% higher revenue for the same period.

These kinds of results are a great by-product of simply executing performance optimization to stay clear within Google’s aforementioned data benchmark. The golden rule is ‘load within three seconds!’ It was clear to us that this does have a positive business impact. Since then, we’ve been tracking and measuring similar impacts for all potential customers with the intent to show how we can positively impact business results. For the full details of our web performance optimization results, you can read our official web performance case study right here.