In retail a slow site costs money directly
In manufacturing a slow site means a lost enquiry you never hear about. In retail it means an abandoned basket you can see in the numbers. It is the only industry where speed converts to revenue directly.
An impatient person holding a phone decides
An e-shop customer has no relationship with your company and nothing holds them there. They came from search or an ad, they are comparing prices and they are one tap from a competitor. Every extra second is an invitation to take it.
The retail sites we measured are the heaviest of any industry. Not because of product photos: because of tracking codes, chat widgets and the page builders they were made in.
What we measured in this industry
The sample holds 70 sites from this industry and 68 of them were measured. The median mobile performance is 60 against 61 for the whole sample. 63 of the 66 measured sites fall short of ninety points, the line Google calls a good result.
Zoom on a phone does not work on 20 of the 66 sites whose pages could be fetched. On 15 of those the setting is not missing, zooming is disabled on purpose.
19 sites in the industry run on WordPress and 9 of them carry at least one outdated plugin. An outdated plugin is the most common way a company website gets compromised.
A typical site from the industry
One real measured site from this industry, without a name, address or town. Not a cherry picked extreme: it is the one sitting exactly in the middle of the industry results.
- Mobile performance
- 60
- Time to main content
- 12.5 s
- Home page weight
- 3.7 MB
- Findings in the scan
- 4
The three faults we saw most often
Not true of every e-shop. True of most of the ones we measured.
The home page weighs as much as a small app
The heaviest home pages of all measured industries. The content people actually came for is a fraction of that weight. The rest are scripts nobody ordered and nobody has dared to switch off for years.
Zoom blocked exactly where zooming matters
Most of the mobile faults we measured are not a missing setting but deliberately disabled zoom. In retail that is the most expensive place to do it: the customer wants to open up a product photo, a label or a size table, and cannot.
Cookie consent that does not hold
Tracking and advertising code starts before the visitor clicks anything, or the banner offers no way to refuse. For a shop running remarketing that is not cosmetic, it is legal exposure with its own scale of fines.
Our sales come through marketplaces and price comparison sites
They do, and you pay for it in margin and in the customer being theirs rather than yours. A comparison site lends them to you for one order and next time sends them to whoever is twenty crowns cheaper.
Your own site does not replace a marketplace. It is the only place where a one off purchase becomes a second one: by email, by a loyalty code, by content. Without it you keep buying the same customer over and over.
What pays off in retail
Features from our catalogue that shorten the path to a purchase. The ones with a live demo can be tried out.
Want to know how your site stands against the industry?
Measure your own siteFrequently asked questions
Do you build e-shops from scratch or on an existing platform?
It depends on the size of the range and what the shop has to do beyond selling. For a standard range a proven platform is usually the sensible choice and our work is making it fast and measurable. Custom work is for shops whose selling rules an off the shelf system cannot follow.
How much can an existing e-shop be sped up?
On the sites we measured, most of the weight sits in third party scripts and unused libraries. Before any rebuild it pays to measure what is actually slowing the page down. We measure it for free and you get the findings with what to do about them.
Can you connect the shop to a stock system?
Yes, connecting stock, accounting or carriers is a normal part of the brief. What matters is whether the system has an interface. If it does not, file exchange works, it just means a compromise on how quickly stock levels update.