According to FEVAD, during Black Friday 2022, 43% of consumers favored online shopping. That’s a 6% increase on the previous year! Is your site ready for this traffic spike?
Despite the economic crisis, inflation and French people’s worries about their purchasing power, many are still :
- favor the internet for purchases of second-hand or reconditioned goods;
- buy their high-end products online, rather than in-store.
What’s more, the internet is still the preferred shopping space for digital natives, whose first reflex is to consult their cell phone (or the internet) before making a purchase!
What’s more, Black Friday is particularly popular for preparing end-of-year gifts, but also for acquiring new technology – in short, for making purchases and saving money at thesame time .The excitement and attraction surrounding this period are therefore very much on everyone’s minds. What’s more, some sectors, such as home furnishings, performed extremely well: 800 million euros spent. And unsurprisingly, the following Monday, Cyber Monday 2022, generated $11.3 billion– a record!
In this still uncertain economic climate, your consumers are all the more on the lookout for BF bargains to save money and prepare their Christmas presents. So, to maximize your profits during this period of skyrocketing sales, youre-commerce site needs to keep up and guarantee a perfectly fluid user experience.
By boosting your loading times, you’re putting all the chances on your side to make the most of this month, with satisfied customers browsing smoothly on all devices. In fact, after 3 seconds of loading, 53% of them leave the page! It’s essential to make a good first impression in this short space of time, because Black Friday is also a time of fierce competition , and an opportunity toacquire new customers.
Finally, a site optimized for loading speed is available even during peak traffic periods. Finally, fast pages support your SEO strategy.
In this article, (re)discover the benefits of webperf for your conversion rates, your UX and your SEO. We’ll share with you case studies and technical tips to help you make this period (and the rest of the year) a success in every way.
The importance of loading speed for your conversion rates
According to a study by Deloitte, 0.1 seconds less loading time on mobile represents :
- +8.4% in conversions and +9.2% on average shopping basket in retail;
- +10.1% conversions and +1.9% average basket in travel;
- +8.6% page views per session in luxury goods.
A fast site encourages engagement and therefore sales, and speed can become a criterion for distinguishing yourself in your market. It’s also essential for boosting the impact of your marketing strategy to showcase your products.
Speed: Internet users’ main UX requirement
There’s no question of wasting time waiting for a page to load. Customers want quick access to the products they want to buy, and a frictionless transaction. In terms of UX requirements, speed even takes precedence over the aesthetic aspects of an interface.
So don’t keep your customers waiting – or Google – and get ahead of your competitors with a fast site on desktop and mobile.
The importance of speed for SEO
You should know that Google is taking an increasingly close look at the subject of loading speed: Core Web Vitals, Page Experience Update, addition of the Speed tab to Search Console, Lighthouse…
The search engine also offers a wide range of monitoring tools to help publishers improve the web at their own level. And there’s plenty of work to be done, since a study by the HTTP Archive site indicates that websites have not become intrinsically faster over the past 10 years, despite an increase in Internet speed.
While server response time (Time To First Byte) was already important for better indexing, Google is also integrating user experience indicators into its algorithm. These are the Core Web Vitals, 3 metrics that track :
- Display speed with the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), i.e. the moment when the most important graphic element is visible on the page. The LCP must occur within 2.5 seconds of the start of loading (in practice, on the product pages of a retail site, this would be the photo of the products in question).
- Interactivity with First Input Delay (FID), the delay between the moment when a user first interacts with a page and the moment when the browser is able to begin responding to that interaction. FID must occur within 100 milliseconds of the start of page loading. However, you should bear in mind that this metric will be replaced by INP by March 2024. With a fast, optimized site, you’re sure to reap the benefits of your actions over the long term.
- Visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), a score that evaluates unexpected content movements on a page. CLS must be less than 0.1.
So, if you want to be ready for the Page Experience update announced by Google in early 2021, you’d better be ready to compete and stay visible. With a site that’s fast and optimized for the long term, you’re sure to reap the benefits of your actions over the long term.
Google also offers Test My Site, a free tool that lets you easily estimate the extra sales you could generate by optimizing the speed of your web pages. Take the test, it’s really revealing!
In principle, a website that delivers a quality experience will :
- reassure your customers (80% of customers who leave a site because it’s too slow don’t come back);
- increase the number of pages viewed per session;
- improve your users’ average shopping basket;
- reduce your bounce rates and thus improve your conversion rates;
- build loyalty (a slow site can reduce loyalty by 50%).
So, to help you take control of your website’s speed right now and prepare for Black Friday (as well as Cyber Monday, Christmas and the Sales), here are a few case studies to inspire you to optimize your loading times and therefore your conversion rates.
Speeding up your site for Black Friday: case studies and best practices
Set up an overflow page to limit bounce rate and cart abandonment
Thanks to the implementation of an overflow page, travel specialist Villages Clubs du Soleil secures sales during promotional periods, which, combined with an overall improvement in loading speed, has helped to reduce the bounce rate by 20%.
Optimize and lighten images
Even if promotions are an opportunity to show off your best side with eye-catching content and visuals, try to “travel light”.
Here’s an example to follow: just before the start of the 2019 winter sales, a famous French shoemaker took care to remove an interstitial on its homepage that weighed particularly heavy (several MB), in order to facilitate access to its Ecommerce site. A good practice whose effects are guaranteed.
Optimize and defer JavaScript
When Fasterize was deployed, the conversion rate of King Jouet ‘s mobile site increased by 5%, one month after the solution was implemented. As with many e-commerce sites, the crucial period for the company was between Black Friday and Christmas. In order to optimize performance during this strategic period, the company was already paying particular attention to third-party applications.
On the occasion of Black Friday 2018, Rakuten managed to save 2 seconds on display time and 1 second on the time needed for the page to become interactive, by modifying the priority of a JavaScript that was slowing down loading.
Depending on the complexity of websites, optimizing third-party scripts, particularly JavaScripts, takes time, not to mention the need to maintain these optimizations. Thanks to our intelligent engine, these optimizations are automated, taking the worry out of JavaScript management.
The lesson to be learned: pay attention to your Third Parties, especially during traffic peaks!
Anticipate code clean-up and redesign projects
3 Suisses redesigned its site to improve speed ahead of the 2019 winter sales. The result: 2 seconds of loading time saved – and as we saw earlier, every millisecond counts.
A small detail, and not the least if you’re familiar with Google’s Lighthouse tool, which assigns a performance score between 0 and 100, these optimizations have enabled the 3 Suisses site to go from a score of 24 to 78!
However, minimize the risks and play for stability: the approach of Black Friday or Cyber Monday is not the right time to add new functionalities or undertake technical projects. Be strategic: do it during a quieter period, when you’ll be able to carry out your tests in serene conditions.
These off-peak periods allow you to work on fundamental issues and review your strategy to optimize your performance.
Automate best practices and speed optimization techniques for successful Black Friday and promotions
Are you convinced of the impact of speed on your entire digital marketing strategy? Here are a few examples of e-commerce sites that have made the wise choice to automate their front-end optimization. This automation saves them time and technical resources, with lasting results.
King Jouet improves conversion rates by 5
King Jouet generates 85% of its sales between November and December. This e-commerce site decided toautomate the optimization of its page speedto relieve its servers during traffic peaks, but also its teams throughout the year:
Thanks to this system, the performance of all platforms on all channels (web and store) is maintained continuously, with little need for intervention by the technical teams.
In addition, search engine visibility is enhanced, and peak loads are absorbed seamlessly, boosting retention, especially during promotional periods.
Result: thanks to this automation of best practices and web performance techniques, the mobile site saw its conversion rate increase by 5% in one month.
Besson Chaussures improves its performance during Black Friday 2022
By automating the optimization of its loading times, Besson Chaussure improved its results throughout the year, particularly before the sales period, with +15% conversion rates. The teams continued to observe an increase in their business performance thanks to these webperf optimizations. Building on this momentum, in the run-up to Black Friday, the teams’ efforts produced the following results:
- Speed Index reduced by -58% on desktop and -21% on mobile;
- Start Render reduced by -55% on desktop and -42% on mobile;
- Time to First Byte reduced by 42% on desktop and -36% on mobile.
And to improve performance even further, the e-tailer’s teams use Fasterize’s Traffic Limiter feature during sales, Black Friday and the festive season. This essential engine feature is designed to alleviate load peaks and relieve servers. In particular, it automatically displays a waiting page during peak periods. Users are then informed that the site is working well, but that they must wait a few moments before continuing their visit.
In short, the speed of your pages is important for your users, as well as for your visibility on search engines, which is crucial if you want to stand out from your competitors. But to benefit from lasting effects, it’s important to remember that speeding up a website is a job that needs to be maintained over time.
Third Parties, optimization of images and all your site’s resources… You can implement the techniques and best practices for a fast site in-house, or entrust this mission to an external solution to save time and resources while benefiting from dedicated support.
And to find out more about techniques and best practices
to keep your site fast during peak periods :
Download our file on load peaks