How 1 second costs High Street fashion brands 20% of their conversions

What difference can a second make? When just a one second delay in load speed can lose 20% of your conversions - each one counts!

Rob Allen, Clothing & Fashion Specialist

With British online retail sales valued at over £100 billion in 2020, it’s vital that fashion websites maintain their competitiveness and their site speeds. If your site is delayed by even 1s you can lose up to 20% of mobile conversions. Site speed can be affected by many factors including having obsolete tools running in the background or large mobile page sizes that slow down browsers.

Be mobile-friendly for on the go browsing

With mobile shoppers accounting for 60% of online shoppers in 2021, a well-performing mobile site is essential for winning conversions.

Fashion retailers are often faced with challenges when it comes to improving site speed. With the pressure on to look as appealing as possible, while hosting an enormous catalogue of product pages, we commonly see fashion brands score low on Google Lighthouse’s mobile page speed index.

Our leading brand, Matalan, came in with a score of 59, landing them in Google’s ‘Okay’ rating, though River Island, Next, Superdry, New Look, Zara, Joules, FatFace, H&M, Monsoon, Oasis, and White Stuff all fell short of the halfway point.

This could be down to page size. While the industry average for mobile page size is 2.2Mb, Oasis came in at a whopping 6.7Mb indicating a need to trim down on slower loading content. However, with five brands coming in below the industry average (Monsoon with 2Mb, Matalan & FatFace with 1.2Mb each, River Island with 0.9Mb, and H&M with 0.4Mb), these brands will need to look elsewhere for improvements.

Too many trackers add too much time!

We had a little dive into trackers and found that Fat Face, White Stuff, River Island and Superdry all have up to 20 on their websites, where 9 is considered average. Too many can have a very detrimental effect on site speed and can even affect GDPR. So, remember, when a tool has fallen out of favour or is no longer useful - remove it!

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q2 2022 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on call 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Rob Allen.