A recent Gomez study on website performance metrics found that 32% of consumers will abandon a website if it’s too slow. That’s almost one third of all shoppers!

A more alarming statistic: 37% of people surveyed said they would NOT return to a slow website. You could be losing more than a third of first time buyers if your site is not snappy.

Speed is king

You can see that people value speed when it comes to online shopping. Google also uses a site’s speed (or lack of) as one of its ranking factors.

But even if you do everything you can to make your site fast (use compression, minimize external calls, streamline css and javascript, etc…), if your host does not make speed a priority, all of this work is for naught.

Our hosting is fast, but how do we prove it?

All of us here at LexiConn know that our servers and offerings are quite fast. As an ecommerce host, we know that fast sites translate into more sales for our clients.

But how do we get this fact across, when there is a sea of false claims and misleading marketing? A quick look at some of the budget hosts out there have claims such as:

Blazing fast servers!

Running your mission critical applications at high speed.

Ensuring your site loads fast

We’ll let the numbers do the talking!

So we decided to put our speed to the test against three budget hosts (base hosting rate under $10/month) that offer ecommerce / ShopSite hosting.

I chose a random ShopSite ecommerce website hosted at each host. For each site, I selected a catalog page that only had html, images, css, and javascript (No dynamic / php scripts). I copied this page and all supporting files/images to a regular shared server on our end. This would represent what the typical customer would experience with us.

The test itself involved two parts:

1. A speed test using the spotcheck feature at www.alertra.com. This service measures the time it takes to download a page from points all across the globe. Two tests were conducted for the page hosted at the budget host, and two tests for that exact same page hosted with us.

2. A speed test in my Firefox browser using the Firebug plugin that measures the time it takes to download a page in its entirety. Five tests were conducted for each hosted page.

The results

The alertra.com speed test results:

Click image to enlarge

As can be seen, our server served up the same page almost twice as fast as all 3 hosts tested from multiple locations across the US.

The Firefox / Firebug speed results:

Click image to enlarge

These Firebug results show that our typical shared server is delivering webpages 2 to 3 times faster than the other hosts. Additionally, while our server exhibited consistently fast load times, the other hosts’ servers were quite erratic, with one test period showing the load time being 5 times as slow!

But don’t just take our word for it…

Here’s what a recent client had to say when they transferred their ShopSite ecommerce store over to LexiConn (on the same shared server as the tests above):

We feel like we are using shopsite for the first time. I thought shopsite just slowed down as you added more products but was wrong. It used to take about 5 minutes to re-generate our store, now it takes seconds. Used to take forever to add a product to a page as the popup took a long time to load now it is right there. If you are using shared hosting and your site is Slow, that is worth upgrading right there.

Pete – www.swanscandles.com

…

Assuming you’ve done all you can in terms of minimizing the time it takes for your pages to load, don’t neglect the powerful impact a good web host can make for a faster website. Make sure your host caters to ecommerce clients, and is actually providing the blazing speed their website promises.

If you’re serious about your ecommerce  or ShopSite website, and are looking for a web host that truly understands the needs of your business (in addition to reliable and truly fast servers), get in touch with us, and we’ll help you make a smooth transition towards better sales.