The Site Speed Standard measures the experience impact of site speed and performance, drawing on the shopping activity of more than 16 billion page views across more than 250 leading retailers. This report focuses on how sites powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud perform.
Benchmarking Salesforce-powered sites v. All sites in the Site Speed Standard
Bounce session page loads are longer by .4 seconds...
…though bounce rates are lower on slower loading pages, at 63%.
Product Detail Pages take .6 seconds longer to load...
…though optimization saves that extra .6 seconds.
Buyers spend 96 seconds waiting for pages to load during their journey...
…though save 34 seconds when optimized.
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A site’s speed is a defining attribute - speed wins, slow bounces. These session performance measures show the impact that speed has on a shopper’s visit.
It’s universal - as page load times go up, so do bounce rates. And, unfortunately, conversion rate falls. Dragging pages is a drag on your site’s KPIs.
Salesforce sites fit with the trend, with a similar shape to both the conversion and bounce rate curves. The slightly lower bounce rates indicate that SFCC site shoppers are slightly less sensitive to the slowest of page loads. Although, the drop off in conversion rate when page loads exceed 6 seconds indicates that conversion is even more sensitive to slow page loads.
A bounce is the worst possible outcome. You’ve attracted – likely even paid - for a shopper to visit. If they bounce, all is lost. And, the clearest path to bounce is waiting. An average bounced shopper waited more than 6 seconds for a page to load.
While SFCC sites’ page loads tend to be higher than the overall, shoppers appear to be slightly more forgiving, converting on slightly longer page loads, and waiting about a half second longer to bounce on average on mobile – and even longer on desktop.
Sites that can deliver page loads in the conversion zone find the sweet spot for conversion, where the share of converted sessions outpaces the share of sessions.
Salesforce sites enjoy a luxury here – the conversion zone on mobile is slightly broader than all sites, extending up to 6 seconds. Faster loads still favor better conversion, of course, with a wider gap between the share of conversions happening and the share of sessions.
The bounce zone is a dreaded space, where the share of bounces outpaces the share of sessions. Salesforce Commerce cloud sites, similar to all sites, see this zone begin at 4 seconds on mobile. On desktop, the trend of Salesforce site shoppers being somewhat more lenient continues - the window of the bounce zone opens slightly later, at 5 seconds.
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While the shopper journey implies a linear path, the shopper’s appetite, and the pages they traffic, vary. These shopper journey measures dissect the site visit.
Shoppers see a lot of a brand during their journey. Salesforce site shoppers go even deeper, with buyer sessions extending 2 pages deeper on both mobile and desktop than across all sites. Browsing session journeys are longer, too. Beware, though, the difference between buyer and browser depth is also wider on Salesforce sites, making it imperative to provide a speedy session to avoid the tedious wait across multiple pages.
The shape of the journey on a Salesforce site mirrors the broader ecommerce journeys; highly concentrated on PDP and Category pages. The slightly higher share of search pages supports the expectation that the sites feature a broader product catalog than their ecommerce peers.
Sites that cultivate deeper journeys tend to offer faster loading pages. While this pattern holds true for Salesforce sites, the journeys are weighted towards sessions with more page views. The most material gains are with the two most popular pages; the Product Detail Pages load nearly a second faster for the deep session sites, while category pages see an improvement of nearly half a second.
The atomic unit of a site is the page. Each page serves a purpose on the site. These page performance measures highlight the importance, and differences, across the core page types.
Optimization is an opportunity. Across the different ecommerce page types, site speed optimization delivers significant page load gains. On Salesforce sites, optimized pages accelerate page loads across each of the primary ecommerce page types. Conversely, every unOptimized page would fall into the dreaded bounce zone, and would be far more likely to bounce shoppers off of a site.
Find out by downloading the 2022 eCommerce Technology Index. As the companion report to the dynamic version of the index, this PDF is designed to help retailers research new innovative features for their sites and understand the impact 3rd party technologies can have on site performance and digital experience.
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Optimization rewards the shopper with a faster site experience, which yields better outcomes for retailers. When saving one second provides nearly 6% conversion lift, the most trafficked page – PDP – saves more than two-and-a-half seconds across Salesforce-powered sites. The benefit is stronger on category pages, too, slicing off more than 2 seconds of page load.
The most cliche - but typical - site performance tradeoff is ‘speed v. innovation.’ While innovative third party technology or rich media promises conversion lift, it also boosts site resources which grind on performance and speed. That is, unless pages are optimized. When optimizing, those heavyweight pages load FASTER than the lightweight pages.
The Site Speed Standard: eCommerce Platform Focus: Salesforce is a companion to the Site Speed Standard.
The Site Speed Standard is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of eCommerce site speed and performance metrics. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure brand, retailer, and shopper anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.
To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have transacted throughout the entire analysis period, in this case March 2021 through March 2022. For current period analyses, the analysis period is March 2022. The median monthly page view for the middle 50% of the analysis set is greater than 1 million, with an interquartile range between approximately 300K and 3M. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.
Data footnotes are noted throughout the report to provide additional clarity on analysis.
The Site Speed Standard is not directly indicative of the operational performance of Yottaa or its reported financial metrics. The performance metrics shared within this report are calculated based on the analysis set, and should not be taken as a guarantee of site performance.
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