The Only Way To Get Sub-1-Second Shopify Pages - Chris Igbojekwe | Why Site Speed Dictates Conversion Rates, How Slow Pages Trigger User Drop-offs, Why Major Technical Issues Delay Loading, How Behavioral Audits Find Leaks, Why Ongoing Testing Wins (#486)

00:00:03:01 - 00:00:30:13 Unknown Hello! Welcome to another episode of the E-commerce Coffee Break podcast. Shopify stores have never looked better, but many brands are losing sales because their sites are too slow. Pages take five seconds, sometimes even longer to load.

And in e-commerce, every extra second can mean lower conversions, higher bounce rates, and wasted ad spend. So today, we're talking about how Shopify brands can cut page load times from three plus seconds to under one second, and why site speed has such a direct impact on revenue. 00:00:30:14 - 00:00:51:03 Unknown To break this down, I'm joined by Chris Igbojekwe. He is the founder of Seed App, a Shopify development studio that helps DTC brands build faster, higher converting Shopify stores.

Chris has more than ten years of experience across engineering, UX conversion optimization, and has worked with e-commerce and fintech companies focused on performance and user experience at scale. So let's get started. 00:00:51:04 - 00:01:11:19 Unknown Chris, great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me close happily.

Be here, Chris. Let's dive into it. The first thing I want to know before we get deeper into the tactics, I would like to know why should Shopify brands care about site speed in the first place? Based on my experience so far working with different e-commerce, there's just generally selling any product online.

00:01:11:22 - 00:01:38:14 Unknown Users these days are used to having certain expectations. So for example, if you wanted to understand a product before you purchase it, you have a certain expectation how much time you want to spend learning about that product and also going through the checkout experience, having a load times or even issues failing in the background can lead to drop offs in your conversion. 00:01:38:16 - 00:02:02:16 Unknown We will dive in all the bits and pieces.

What makes a site slow? So let's start. First off, why slow speed or a slow loading page really impacts conversions and revenue. What are the issues that play into this?

The multiple issues basically, when a user comes to your site, usually have an intent to perhaps purchase a product or learn about the service that you provide. 00:02:02:17 - 00:02:36:12 Unknown The speed of getting them from the point of intent to conversion is really what you you want to capitalize on. The longer you spend delaying that process, the more likely you user is likely to drop off for whatever reason. Perhaps they have a competing offer that they're considering, or they feel perhaps your site is not functional.

So that time gap, that decision window is very critical when a user is on your website or your ecommerce store. 00:02:36:12 - 00:03:06:09 Unknown So I hear two things there. I hear the technical side and I hear the user experience side. Let's start from the technical side.

What makes a Shopify store slow? Is it the apps? Is it a theme? Where does it happen?

It can come from multiple angles. Some very common issues are huge images. Perhaps you don't have optimized images on your Shopify app, or you have same thing with videos. 00:03:06:15 - 00:03:41:23 Unknown You have large videos.

I have seen cases where users have or Shopify stores have errors running in the background. Perhaps your theme is not optimized, or I've seen cases where people combine liquid with perhaps react as part of their code, and if it's not optimized built properly, this can lead to leakage. As you can see in the background and slow down your page load or even you checkout flow as well. 00:03:42:00 - 00:04:01:04 Unknown Let's dive one deeper.

And that's one thing that I have seen a lot in the past is apps. People are overdoing. What's your experience there? What have you seen when it comes to apps?

This is a tricky one because you don't have a lot of control over this one. And the only way to really understand if a third party application is affecting your site. 00:04:01:04 - 00:04:23:11 Unknown We actually had an experience with this, which I can get into later on is to test it so you you can measure your app performing on its own without any third party applications. See how it performs.

There are many tools you can use for this. Lighthouse is on every browser. You can just click inspect on your browser and go to lighthouse. 00:04:23:11 - 00:04:44:01 Unknown You can see the page load speed, and then you can compare it.

When you integrate a third party application. Preferably you want to do this in dev mode. So in your Shopify application you want to do this in dev mode. Or you want to do this in a theme that is not public yet.

It's not published, it's not your main theme. 00:04:44:01 - 00:05:09:20 Unknown So you want to test it out there, see how it performs, and test this over time as well, because these third party applications make updates over time, so it's not constant. We try to do this every two weeks, every month, depending on how many party applications are using and how reliable they are. But it's an ongoing process.

It's not a one fix solution. 00:05:09:22 - 00:05:29:00 Unknown I want to talk a little bit about somebody. Most of our listeners are running on Shopify. If they have a shop now and they are not really sure.

Is it loading fast because you can get sort of blind or not see the force because of the trees. When you're testing from your own device and never test from the outside world. 00:05:29:00 - 00:05:46:15 Unknown What's your approach? When you see a new site, somebody approaches you and you start testing the first thing you want to do.

Ultimately, start from the bottom line. This is the way we look at when we come in to help. We look at it more as we're coming to help out of business. We want to help you convert it, usually with high to convert.

00:05:46:15 - 00:06:10:13 Unknown And speed is one of the factors that helps with conversion. But ultimately it's all about conversion. What we do is we use multiple tools. Lighthouse is one of them, but one of the tools that we use often is Microsoft Clarity.

This gives us direct insight into user behavior. So what is exactly happening on each page? What's happening in your checkout flow? 00:06:10:14 - 00:06:35:02 Unknown Are they drop offs?

What are people clicking on? What pages are they spending time on? What pages are they dropping off on? And then we break this down.

And then this gives us insight into what we should be focusing on and perhaps what is not as important. So for example, let's say you have a checkout flow where you add items to your cart and you show some information before you final checkout. 00:06:35:03 - 00:06:53:23 Unknown If you notice that users are dropping off at that point, perhaps you have a drop off rate of more than 30%. I'm throwing out a number.

This depends on industry. Perhaps you want to look into that. You want to look into that page not just for speed. You want to look at speed for sure.

But what information are you showing? 00:06:53:23 - 00:07:16:20 Unknown Are you being player? Is is the process easy and intuitive to the user? Are there errors?

Then you can start to deep dive and unpack exactly what is happening based on direct information from a user. Okay, so this brings me to the second part. And you spoke about user experience conversion optimization at the end of the day. 00:07:16:20 - 00:07:39:18 Unknown And you said that speed is just part of the overall conversion optimization process when it comes.

I think everyone knows by now that most traffic comes from mobile devices, and there's 1,000,001 different mobile devices out there. What's your approach testing on mobile devices? Because I think that's particularly difficult on the desktop. Everyone can test every browser, but when it comes to mobile devices, things become a bit more sketchy.

00:07:40:00 - 00:08:05:11 Unknown It's the same process. It's basically it depends on the tool you're using. So you can simulate on each type of mobile device Android, iOS. You can also simulate not just on your mobile devices, but on the specific browsers within the mobile devices.

So far. Firefox. This takes me back to the initial point about the audit. You want to audit who your users are, so you want to see trends.

00:08:05:13 - 00:08:27:19 Unknown What devices are they using? For example, sometimes you might think it's mobile, but perhaps the users that convert for the most part are on desktop. So first you want to figure out who your users are, what devices they use and what browsers they use, and what are the trends. And then you can deep dive into it.

But to answer your question, it's the same process. 00:08:27:19 - 00:08:56:00 Unknown So Microsoft Clarity, one of the tools that I love using provides insight into mobile use as well. Heatmaps user behavior. Same thing with lighthouse.

Lighthouse also provides mobile speed metrics as well as well as desktop, so the process is pretty much the same regardless of the device. What kind of results do you see after the optimization? Can you give some examples in some case studies? 00:08:56:00 - 00:09:21:11 Unknown Oh, absolutely.

One of our main Clyde's right Now publishing clearinghouse is a household name in America. And they just went through a major rebrand. It wasn't doing so well initially, which is why I was hired to come in and help with conversion. I cannot give specifics, but we saw more than a ten x increase and we're seeing steady growing volume daily.

00:09:21:17 - 00:09:49:21 Unknown This was partially held by conversion, but also with lots of marketing efforts and things that go into this. But based on the conversion changes that we made with speed, with clarity in marketing the products and having an easy checkout, this is critical, making it very intuitive. We saw huge improvements, significant improvements, like I said, ten x at this point, but this has grown over time. 00:09:49:22 - 00:10:15:13 Unknown The initial changes we saw about 2 or 3 X improvement.

And then we've been doing this for about five months now. And it's been honestly, it's been kind of surprising even for me as as the person helping with conversions. Kind of it's interesting to see how theoretically you can say, okay, this they should make an improvement based on the metrics that we're reading. 00:10:15:15 - 00:10:40:14 Unknown But then to actually see real numbers and people interact with these improvements and see it happen in real time, it's quite it's quite surprising and encouraging to it's also a confidence boost alone.

Okay, this this works. We know certain improvements can can affect the bottom line. That's for sure a extreme number there I mean that's that's really ten X is just completely out of this world. 00:10:40:14 - 00:11:07:01 Unknown But it shows how much potential is in there once you start optimizing.

Now for our listeners, a lot of small and medium enterprises, if they start on a small budget, what are the first three fixes they should make to get started? I think the three fixes really depends on your users. I would love to generalize and give you three points like, you know, look at your speed, improve your checkout experience. 00:11:07:01 - 00:11:34:05 Unknown But it really I've learned over time that data is really where where you want to do an audit.

You want to see exactly what is going on before you make decisions. Another area that helps that, I guess I think is overlooked a little bit. Or heat maps. You want to see where it uses a click.

You know when you get to first screen where they arrive in, where do they naturally gravitate towards where they spend in time? 00:11:34:10 - 00:12:03:08 Unknown When they spend the time tells you perhaps they're reading, trying to collect information, or perhaps there's an error somewhere or something froze. So you want to see these trends and then make decisions based on what exactly happened. And also you want to collect relevant data over a significant amount of time, perhaps a week, two weeks, a month.

The longer the amount of data you have, the more you can rely on that on that data and make decisions based off of that. 00:12:03:08 - 00:12:24:12 Unknown But I would always go back to making decisions based on exactly what's what's happening on your on your ecommerce store. I want to ask you, as a UX and conversion optimization expert, there is like when it comes to testing, obviously you don't want to test ten things at a time. You want to test one thing and then another another.

00:12:24:12 - 00:12:48:09 Unknown So how would you build up a strategy? Now we're talking about a timeline to make sure that you really get the data out of your testing, depending on the size of your store. I think generally try to go for minimum ten days. Ten days gives you a reasonable amount of data.

Ideally, you want to spend a month. It depends on how big your stories, how many products you have. 00:12:48:10 - 00:13:16:04 Unknown But based on the clients we've worked with so far, I would say a month is a good amount of time. You can get data you can start working with within a few weeks, but then you can iterate on it.

There is no perfect data or test window. I would always encourage you just to start, get the data that's available, make a thesis and then make adjustments based on that, and then test. 00:13:16:04 - 00:13:37:07 Unknown Over time, as users change, the marketplace changes. You have to be adaptable as time goes on, but it's an ongoing process.

I would say a month on average based on our client so far. I think it's important what you just said. It's an ongoing process. It's not a once off and then forget about it.

You need to do this all the time. 00:13:37:08 - 00:14:01:00 Unknown Now, a lot of our listeners might have either not the skills to experience all the time to do this. So that's where you come in. Tell me who's your perfect customer?

What kind of industries and brands do you work with? So I've worked across quite a wide variety of brands, but usually my perfect client is they usually have a store that is generating some form of revenue, but they know they have not. 00:14:01:00 - 00:14:30:01 Unknown They're not optimizing the revenue. Perhaps they're huge drop offs.

Or are the sales that used to be much higher than it currently is, or people are complaining about user experience, basically conversion rate issues and user experience issues. This is where I love to come in and dig in and do an audit and ask questions and really see what's going on and see how I can help in terms of the product or what they offer. 00:14:30:02 - 00:14:47:11 Unknown I've come to learn it's I've been doing this for about ten years and I've worked in different industries.

You come to learn that essentially it's the same regardless of the product, as long as it's not a service, regardless of the product. People want to come in, they want to understand what you offer. They usually have a buying intent to buy. 00:14:47:11 - 00:15:11:08 Unknown An intent could be strong in the medium, it could be low, but you want to capture that intent.

Are you going to clarify your message? You know you're being cleared by your product. Is the checkout process easy? The things we do not control are your pricing like how you're pricing your product.

That's that's something you cannot control. But if your pricing is within the range of what they want, then then we can take it from there and ensure that you can convert. 00:15:11:09 - 00:15:34:04 Unknown But it's the same clarity of product, easy checkout experience. It's the same across most, most products.

Okay. Is there any kind of homework that emergence or brand needs to do before they come to you and to get started? Yes. Ideally you want to know as much as possible who your users are.

You want to know who your users are. 00:15:34:06 - 00:15:59:00 Unknown You want to be clear about what your offer is. And then even if you're not clear about what the problem is, that's okay. That's what we do.

But who you are, how you want to present yourself to your users and who your users are is. This helps us solve your problem a lot quicker than otherwise. We're both laughing about this, but actually it happens quite often that people have just a very faint idea of who's buying from them. 00:15:59:00 - 00:16:22:22 Unknown So actually it's a bigger problem than one might think.

So it's definitely, definitely helping. Yeah, yeah, it's quite surprising. We've worked with a grant who are actually quite successful and they've never done any user research. But, you know, they figure it out somehow intuitively without actually breaking it down.

So that is also cases that we've come across. Okay. 00:16:23:00 - 00:16:44:00 Unknown How does your pricing structure work. How do you charge for your services.

So we have different pricing structures. We have usually we come in and we work on a project which depends again on the scale. If you want us to help with conversion with just optimization of certain areas. So we do an audit and then we also have a retainer model.

00:16:44:00 - 00:17:11:21 Unknown Our retainer model starts from minimum of $5,000 a month all the way to 18. So depending on what what you want in terms of the price of the actual project itself. Let's say wanted to do a conversion optimization. It really depends.

Depends on what you need. I'll be rewriting your entire story. If you were rewriting your entire store and many pages of my products, you have. 00:17:11:23 - 00:17:36:14 Unknown If it's a small store, very different from perhaps an enterprise.

So so that really depends. But we can provide estimates after after an audit. Okay, that makes perfect sense. Cool.

Chris, before coffee break comes to an end, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? If anyone wants to reach out, we can easily reach us at IO. 00:17:36:19 - 00:17:59:18 Unknown You can get a free estimate on how much it will cost to audit your site, or just reach out for if you have any questions. Okay, cool.

I will put the link in the show notes and you just one click away. Chris, thanks so much for giving us an overview. That is not only the load time, which is very important, but there is a lot of things around this to make a short work, and I hope a lot of people will reach out to you and get there optimized on that side. 00:17:59:19 - 00:18:03:04 Unknown Thanks so much for your time today.

Thank you so much, Klaus. Appreciate it.