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 Shopify-powered sites perform.
Benchmarking Shopify-powered sites v. All sites in the Site Speed Standard
Bounce rates soar to 74% when page loads take more than 6 seconds…
…and fall to only 47% with sub-3 second loads.
Buyers spend more than a minute waiting for pages to load during their journey...
…though optimization saves 22 seconds of wait time.
Heavyweight product detail pages on mobile take nearly 6 seconds to load...
…though optimization saves more than 2 seconds, as they beat lightweight unoptimized pages.
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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, so falls conversion rate. Dragging pages is a drag on your site’s KPIs.
Shopify sites exaggerate this trend. The highs are higher, and the lows are lower. The slowest loading sites see barely single digit conversion rates, way down from their peak of 2.7%. And bounces soar – 3 of 4 shoppers bounce when page loads exceed 6 seconds.
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.
Shoppers achieving each site outcome - bounce, browse, or buy - enjoy slightly faster page loads on Shopify sites than overall. Beware, though, as the average bounce session is at 6 seconds – meaning that the shopper is not going to wait for slow page loads.
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.
Shopify merchants have a tight squeeze here – the conversion zone lasts only up to four seconds, after which conversion rate falls. And, at the slow end of the spectrum conversions are few and far between, as session share far outpaces conversion share.
The bounce zone is a dreaded space, where the share of bounces outpaces the share of sessions.
And Shopify sites have a broad bounce zone. Across both devices, the bounce zone begins at 4 seconds, providing a strict mandate – beat 4 seconds, or see shoppers bounce. While bounce share overtakes session share earlier on Shopify sites than others, they share a consistently negative pattern (and upward slope) when page loads slow.
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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.
Compared with sites powered by other platforms, buyers navigating Shopify sites tend to have shorter buyer journeys - by nearly a full page on mobile. The browser journey depth is relatively similar across both devices.
Shopify’s anatomy of the buyer’s journey is even more heavily concentrated towards the two most important pages - product detail and category. Taken together - a more PDP-centric and slightly shorter journey means that Shopify sites are competing for a shopper’s conversion with less contribution from other pages- namely, fewer searches.
With fewer pages per journey, the sum of the wait times is lower on Shopify sites. Still, the unOptimized journey takes more than a minute of a shopper’s time. The silver lining here is that when performance is prioritized and sites are optimized, wait times are reduced 34%, or nearly 2 seconds per page view.
Sites that cultivate deeper journeys tend to offer faster loading pages. While Shopify sites tend to have slightly shallower journeys, those that do span beyond 11 pages see the fastest load times.
The most material gains are with the two most popular pages; the Product Detail Pages load a half of a second faster for the deep session sites, while category pages see about a third of a second improvement.
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 Shopify sites, optimized pages accelerate page loads across each of the primary ecommerce page types. Most importantly, the most viewed pages see some of the strongest gains - nearly 2 seconds of savings on the PDP and Category pages.Conversely, every unOptimized page - except searches (which are less frequent on Shopify sites) would fall into the dreaded bounce zone, and would be far more likely to bounce shoppers.
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Optimization rewards the shopper with a faster site experience, which yields better outcomes for retailers. The per page savings for Shopify-powered sites are in line with the other sites analyzed in the Site Speed Standard, highlighted by the nearly 2 second savings per PDP and Category page.
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: Shopify 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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