Website loading speed is not the only and not the main, but it is an important factor in search engine rankings. Not only your positions in the search results, but also the behavior of users on the site depend on this indicator.

Store visitors are not ready to wait for the page they need to load, and they will not stay long on a site that loads slowly. And user behavior on the site is an additional factor that can determine the place of your store's pages in the search results.

If your website loads slowly, you will not only lose a customer, but also get a deterioration in user metrics, which Google looks at before showing your site to interested visitors.

Every year, more and more visitors come to websites from mobile devices. In our statistics, we see that in most stores, mobile traffic accounts for 60%, and in a large number of stores, 80-90% of the total traffic.

A few years ago, Google announced the priority of mobile content, and since 2019, this rule has been applied to new sites by default. The principle of mobile priority means that the ranking of pages depends mainly on their mobile version when indexing.

The most important pages for analyzing the website loading speed in an online store are the main customer entrance pages. You can determine which pages these are by studying the corresponding report in the analytics. For most online stores, these are catalog sections and product pages. It is these pages that customers come to by the most highly converting queries and with a desire to buy. You should pay the most attention to these pages when working on website optimization.

Many website owners make the mistake of paying a lot of attention to the homepage. This makes sense for stores with large branded traffic, which is more likely to be true for promoted stores that have been around for a long time. While for new stores, the landing pages described above are critical.

There are many free tools that help you check your website's loading speed. The most popular of them due to its ease of use and informative content is PageSpeed Insights (PSI) from Google itself.

In PageSpeed Insights, you can see how fast a page loaded for real users.

Loading speed score is an indicator on a 100-point scale that is formed on the basis of simulating page loading, it divides pages into three categories: fast, normal, and slow loading. A score of 90 points or more is considered good, and a score of 50 to 90 is considered average. If you score less than 50 points, the page loads slowly.

From the search engine's point of view, only slow-loading pages are considered low-quality, and only such pages can be penalized. Good and average speeds are considered normal and acceptable.

It would be a mistake to take PSI's recommendations as something that must be implemented. You don't have to follow these recommendations at the expense of your site's functionality or your customers' convenience, although you should certainly study them carefully, analyze them, and apply what can improve the situation.

The main task of working with the results of page analysis in PSI is not to get the highest score at any cost, but to find a balance between the necessary content and functions of the site, visitor convenience, and loading speed.

Google periodically changes the algorithm for evaluating sites with this tool, so the site's score may change for the worse. But this does not mean that the site itself has become slower or worse. In addition, the score of one site can fluctuate within short periods of time.

At Cartum, we regularly monitor the changes required by search engines and work to optimize factors that depend directly on the platform itself, such as:

But the loading speed depends not only on the platform, but also on the organization of the store content. Below, you will find our recommendations that will help you improve your page load speed score.

We do not recommend uploading images to your website in PNG format. This is especially true for product photos. Images in this format are of big size, which is one of the important factors in page loading speed.

The recommended format for uploading images is JPG. Photos in this format are well compressed and take little space, which significantly speeds up the loading of the catalog page and product card. At the same time, the screen resolution of modern mobile devices is so high that compression does not distort the quality of photos for customers.

It is worth noting that we have expanded the optimization of work with images using the WEBP format. All photos uploaded to the site are converted to the WEBP format for our clients. But even if these recommendations are implemented, a miracle will not happen: the higher the quality of the images on the site and the bigger their size, the slower the page will load.

It's hard to imagine a modern online store that doesn't have basic marketing systems connected to it, at least Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.

However, even connecting in full compliance with Google's requirements of their own products, such as Google Tag Manager, will lower the PSI score. A normal score for sites with the most necessary analytics scripts will be 70+, while a site without analytics can show a score of 90 and higher.

The situation is even worse with other third-party systems, most of which require the installation of scripts — separate pieces of program code — in different parts of the site's pages to perform actions required by that system.

These systems include online consultants, mailing services, widgets and pop-ups with advertising materials, online fitting room widgets, and third-party analytics systems. Each additional third-party script on your website will slow down its loading speed and can reduce the PSI score by a dozen points.

When choosing and installing such systems, it is necessary to weigh the expected benefits of increased orders and repeat purchases against the losses to assess the download speed very carefully.

The situation is similar with custom fonts, which can be added to a Cartum website using scripts and custom.css. It is worth weighing carefully what to give preference to — adding beauty to the pages or the practical advantage of loading speed.

Pay attention to the additional content on catalog and product pages , especially if you obtain the original product description data from suppliers.

On the catalog page, it's important to pay attention to the size of the banner images and the content that can be entered in the SEO text field.

On the product page, check the description block. Its content should be checked and corrected so that the block does not contain links to third-party pages, uninformative or too large additional images.

You should carefully review the banners that you plan to place on the homepage, and for the mobile version of your site, it is advisable to leave only the banners with the most important information and set up the display of individual banner lines.

Evaluating and optimizing your site's loading speed is not a one-time event; you can't check this indicator once and then ignore it. Constant work with images, product descriptions, as well as analyzing the effectiveness and real need for any third-party solutions should become an integral part of regular site maintenance.