How can you improve conversions on your website?

In this bi-weekly micro webinar series, Catchpoint and ITOps Times have teamed up to discuss six critical topics that are essential for ensuring Internet Resilience for your business.  We’ve explored the importance of Internet Resilience and Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). We’ve examined how Internet Resilience can drive revenue for e-commerce players and how companies can enhance their network and API performance. Furthermore, we have explored strategies for improving employees' digital experience.

Explore each of the topics in the series:

1.     Why should you care about Internet Resilience?

2.     Introducing IPM: How does it help?

3.     How can Internet Resilience help eCommerce players drive more revenue?  

4.     How can companies improve Network and API performance?

5.     How can companies improve their employees’ digital experience?

6.     (This Post) How can you improve conversions on your website?

Our 6^th and final segment focuses on a vital aspect: enhancing conversions on your website. Join us as we uncover actionable insights to optimize your website's performance and increase conversion rates.

Now, let’s get into the episode!

How can you improve conversions on your website?  

Watch this Q&A with Henri Brisard, WebPageTest Developer Community Manager, or read the video transcript below.

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Video Transcript

David Rubinstein

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth and final installment of our ITOps Times Live Micro Webinar series with Internet Resilience company Catchpoint. With me today is Henry Brisard, the WebPageTest Developer Community Manager. Bonjour Henri!

Henri Brisard

David, thanks for having me, I’m happy to be here. And as you mentioned, we’ve been doing this micro webinar series together and I've been given the anchor leg to finish it off.

David Rubinstein

Bring it home.

Henri Brisard

I will bring it home. I'm just going to share this fantastic presentation I prepared for both of us. Can you see that? Today I’m going to talk about improving conversion on your website.

I am part of the team you’ve been speaking to throughout this series, and you’ve already about a number of our solutions from Mark, Howard, Leo, Gerardo, and Mehdi. But today, I have the honor of hanging out with you, David, and we're going to talk about the web experience. I'd love to discuss performance as we are an Internet Performance Monitoring company. We'll also touch on resilience and all the associated aspects.

One thing we often talk about is how on the modern web, every single second counts. You might remember this statistic from some time back where we found out that 53% of visits were abandoned when a site took longer than 3 seconds to load. Now, three seconds just went by, we just lost 53% of our visitors. That’s very significant.

In fact, one of the things we discovered while talking to good friends in the industry, people at Akamai for example, is that out of the G7 countries, about the 75th percentile, do you know that the page load time exceeds 3 seconds? So right out the gate, we face some challenges. We found out earlier before we got on that we're both sports guys, so we like numbers. We're going to go through a few numbers right now. So, 50%, what do you think that is, David?

David Rubinstein

Half

Henri Brisard

You are half correct. So, 50% is related to Loreal, a company we worked with a few years ago. They wanted to boost their conversions and achieve higher numbers. We joined forces and worked on improving their performance, ultimately enabling them to reach the coveted 50% milestone they had been striving for. Our collaboration with Loreal has continued, and today, they have emerged as a formidable player in the e-commerce sector, with an impressive, reported revenue of around €10 billion last year, representing a remarkable 9% year-over-year increase. We are delighted to have played a role in helping them achieve their goals and maintain a performance-oriented culture. Now, let's keep playing the numbers game. Do you notice a pattern, David? 5, 10 and 15.

David Rubinstein

I do.

Henri Brisard

There's a company called Carpe that operates primarily online and offers creams, lotions, and similar products. They achieved a 5% increase in conversion rates, a 10% boost in traffic, and a 15% increase in sales. Their success can be attributed to their utilization of the Shopify platform, which has a dedicated merchant performance team. This team, consisting of three members, assists merchants in addressing performance-related issues. Carpe specifically benefited from using the WebPageTests available on the Shopify platform. These tests helped them focus on improving metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, which are crucial for enhancing user experience and conversion rates.

David Rubinstein

It's almost like you can lead a customer to a shopping cart, but by improving the performance, you can get them to complete the purchasing process.

Henri Brisard

Absolutely.

David Rubinstein

It's like leading a horse to water, as they say. You can't make them drink. However, in this case, if you guide a customer along the right path swiftly, offering what they desire, and ensuring an easy and positive experience, you'll increase your chances of making more sales.

Henri Brisard

And you know, it's fascinating to note that when it comes to guiding customers towards the shopping cart, we have numerous solutions within the realm of web. For instance, we have tools like user journey replication and web testing, which allow us to identify and address any pain points or bottlenecks along the way.

That's a fantastic point you just brought up, let's keep going. WebPageTest plays a vital role in performance analysis. With this tool, you can expose some of the key metrics – where you're doing well, where you're failing potentially. And that's where you can start to make some of these key measurements that are going to help you reach some of these conversion goals.

But that was Carpe, what if you're someone like Loreal? You have multiple platforms, operating in 80 different countries across the globe, in that case, you would benefit from utilizing a comprehensive solution like our Catchpoint dashboard. And that's simply because you have a nice visual of what's going on, and it’s accessible and useful for both engineers and non-engineers alike. You can just look at a graph and say, hey, my LCP is down, my CLS is up. What's going on? So, you can start to make some informed decisions.

Now, I don't know what you were doing this week. If on Tuesday you were relaxing, I was stressing out because of that AWS outage. I was trying to buy something online, I had no idea what was going on, and I eventually found out on Twitter.

We conducted a study on outages and disruptions with the assistance of the good people at Forrester. They surveyed eCommerce strategists, and we were astounded to learn that they experienced an average of 76 disruptions per month.

The modern web has so many moving parts that necessitate continuous monitoring. Staying vigilant and proactive is essential because, as we witnessed during events like Super Tuesday, disruptions can have a widespread impact and become evident throughout the Internet. In the survey I mentioned, it was found that three out of four e-commerce strategists expressed concerns about the growing annoyance experienced by consumers, like you and me, when faced with disruptions. These moments emphasize the importance of diligent monitoring, ensuring that everything runs seamlessly and addressing any performance-related issues. Taking care of your web experiences, with a specific focus on performance, becomes crucial in providing a smooth and uninterrupted online experience for users.

Earlier I mentioned that every second counts, with 53% of visitors abandoning websites that take 3 seconds or longer to load. But we also believe that every byte counts, and we are in a moment in history where the web is a lot more complicated than it used to be. We're sending a lot more resources down the pipe and that involves a lot of data centers around the world that are doing a lot of heavy lifting for us.

One of the notable capabilities we have introduced to our web solution is called Carbon Control. It serves up an estimate of your carbon footprint, which is essential in understanding the resources you are sending to users on their mobile devices while they navigate your website or potentially make purchases. This feature acts as a proxy for data transmitted, considering the significant influx of JavaScript, images, and various other resources being delivered. It provides valuable insights into your data usage. Additionally, we are examining factors such as the energy sources used by your data center, hosting provider, and third-party services. This consideration aligns with the growing importance of sustainability practices. People increasingly prioritize environmentally friendly choices, and companies are likewise striving to adopt greener approaches due to evolving regulations. Within the e-commerce realm, numerous moving parts contribute to overall success, and each aspect we have discussed today is super-duper important.

David Rubinstein

All right, well, we're about out of time. So, Henri, thank you very much for the conversation today. Really appreciate it.

Henri Brisard

David, it was my absolute pleasure as well.  

David Rubinstein

I want to let our attendees know that all six episodes of this micro webinar series are available on demand at sdtimes.com. So, if you only caught the first one, the last one or any one in between, you can go back and watch the entire series at sdtimes.com. I'd also like to thank Catchpoint for sponsoring this series. I think it's been outstanding, and people have a greater understanding now of how the Internet can impact so many things in their business. Until next time, folks, I'm Dave Rubenstein at SD Times. So long for now.