Hack your ad & SEO performance by 2x with speed optimization checklist

An online store struggled with low conversions and frustrated customers…

Despite spending a lot on ads and bringing customers on the site, the results just weren’t there.

The ads were effective, the offer was enticing, and the brand was well-known in the industry… so why weren’t customers responding?

After our initial inspection, it became clear what the problem was – long load times made the site frustrating to use.

Some of the main issues included:

• A delay of several seconds with no feedback after adding items to the cart
• Cart items taking too long to update
• Product pages taking 5 seconds or more to load (annoying loading spinner driving users mad)
• Images taking a while to load
• Changing payment and shipping options in checkout taking ages
• A sluggish checkout process
• Site crashing during peak traffic hours

No matter how great the offer or design is, if the website makes users wait, it won’t convert.

Users will give up shopping and likely never return.

Such user behavior—leaving the site quickly—is also a signal to Google and other search engines that the site is not meeting user expectations. This leads to lower rankings, as search engines prioritize sites that provide better user experiences.

We started optimizing by going through a checklist to find points that apply to our case

At first, we focused on easiest fixes with the biggest impact:

• • We identified & replaced plugins that were no longer necessary or efficient,
  • converted images to WebP format,
  • Configured Lazyloading,
  • Delaying unnecessary scripts…

Performance metrics slowly started to pick up but not yet the results we wanted.

We continued with more advanced fixes like:

• • Making sure autoload was below 800kb,
  • Displaying product page photos using non-jQuery gallery,
  • Implementing pagination functionality,
  • Disabling Woocommerce scripts and styles on pages where they’re not needed…

While the metrics were improving, it wasn’t to the level we had seen in previous projects. Something was still holding us back, so we knew we needed to dig deeper…

How our Checklist guided us to the performance bottleneck

Our checklist approach ensures we cover every aspect, and once again, it proved invaluable.

In Woocommerce section in our Checklist, there is a point about product variations management. Poorly optimized product variations caused the site to bloat and it was exactly the fix we needed. Despite having only 29 products, there were 801 product variations.

Each variation is processed as a separate product, significantly impacting query performance and load times.

Fixing this problem (using Scalability Pro plugin – explained in checklist), along with the earlier improvements, made the website much faster and the performance metrics shoot up through the roof.

It was the breakthrough we were looking for.

The “Fast Website” impact

We continuously monitored the site to maintain its improved performance and over time, we measured the following results:

1. • Lightning-fast load times: The site’s average load time dropped from 5.2 seconds to 1.8 seconds, a staggering 188% improvement.
   • Bounce rate plummets: With faster load times, the bounce rate fell by 35%, keeping customers engaged.
   • Conversions soar: A 21% increase in conversion rates translated to a significant boost in sales and revenue.
   • SEO wins: Improved load times and reduced bounce rates led to a 20% rise in organic traffic, thanks to better search engine rankings.
   • Happy customers: Improved speed and performance led to higher customer satisfaction and glowing reviews.