What Happens If You Optimize Speed Instead Of UX — Darin Archer | Why Slow Sites Lose 90% Of Shoppers, Why Third-Party Apps Cause Most Delays, Why The “3-

What Happens If You Optimize Speed Instead Of UX — Darin Archer | Why Slow Sites Lose 90% Of Shoppers, Why Third-Party Apps Cause Most Delays, Why The “3-Second Rule” Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All, What $5–10M Stores Should Fix First (#411) Speaker 1: With the app store, I mean, it is just phenomenal how easy it is, right? And I'm very excited having something in the app store. But when I think about it from the merchant side, it's like you can try something new with a click of a button, right? Well, that's great. But then how well does it perform with everything else you have on the site? Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Did you know that 90% of consumers will leave a site if it's not loading quick enough? So in a nutshell, shoppers won't wait for your website. Site speed is obviously very important. That's the topic of today. And with me on the show today, I have Darin Archer. He is the vice president of product strategy at Yota.com. That's Y-O-T-T-A-A dot com. They are the market leader in site speed performance. Darin drives Lauter's product strategy, expanding web performance to optimize digital experience for speed and commercial success. With experience at GAP, Adobe, Intel, IBM, and Accenture, he's a transformative leader and he's also an alumni of the University of Montana. So, let's welcome Darin to the show. Hi, how are you today? Speaker 1: Hey, thank you very much, Claus, for having me. I'm excited. Speaker 2: I'm very excited to talk about site speed. It's for a lot of merchants a bit of an afterthought and it's so important. So tell me, why is site speed important? Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's interesting if you think about the history of the web, we started particularly, and I'll keep it framed on e-commerce, we started with pretty static websites, right? And so how the sites loaded, we had a basic concept of, hey, let's start to cache the web experience for users closer to where they're actually requesting it, whether it's their home or their office, etc. And that kind of got us through web 1.0, if you will. And then there was that explosion of the user-generated content and websites becoming a lot more personalized. And more importantly, e-commerce sites are so dynamic, right? Because so much of what loads for that customer experience is based on the behavior of the customer. Have they been there before? What browsers are they using? Where are they at in the world? Things like that. And so over time, our e-commerce storefronts have become kind of like our garages or our closets, and we start adding lots to them. Sometimes it's great capabilities from third parties. Other times it's little free things that we've, you know, developers found and added to try to make maybe some cool, you know, carousel on a homepage, etc. All this starts to add up to having an impact on what that customer experience is and how fast it loads. And, you know, what we see is a lot of consumers, and I think you and I as well, and everyone listening, you know, there's moments where we actually sit down to go shopping, so to speak, right, whether it's on our phone or laptop or whatever or out in the physical world. And then there are moments where we're kind of casually in and out of that. And if you don't really have that site performance styled in, then oftentimes a lot of those folks would just bounce and go on to the next activity or task that they could be focused on. So that's really where I see an interesting change now is that there's a lot more competition out there for customers, the consumer attention. And we've been really good as an industry of finding ways to kind of move beyond just what the e-commerce platforms give us out of the box and add some very, very cool things from many companies, sometimes built by our own teams, to create that real fit-for-purpose, that rich customer experience, whether it's product recommendations or personalization capabilities, etc. But they all come with a little bit of a tax on the site, right? And so that's really where the opportunity is. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think a good point that you mentioned there, more features have or might have an impact on the speed, and obviously no one wants to wait. Everyone is already annoyed if a site is loading a little bit slower than you probably – the user experience is just not good there. Now, big companies like Amazon, they spend a ton of money in speed optimization. I mean, if it's slower than three seconds, I think you're losing out there. Now, tell me a little bit about the advantages of going through a speed optimization process because a lot of versions, obviously, they test in their office with a fast internet connection in their browser, and I have heard that more than once. They say, well, everything looks fine. It's loading fast on desktop. What's the problem there? Speaker 1: First thing there is I say try turning your Wi-Fi off on your phone and going to your own store and then see how it loads on your cellular connection, right? Because the reality is most of our traffic And most of our customers on the Shopify stores, most of the traffic is mobile and most of the conversions nowadays, depending on the brand, are actually increasingly mobile. So a lot of times that viewpoint isn't accurate, right? So I think step one is, do you have a tool in place that will allow you to know what your customer experience really is? And a lot of our customers have come to us because, you know, Shopify does a great job giving you a lot out of the box. And then there's other free analytics tools in the digital analytics side like Google Analytics. But they've all been, they've all grown up and evolved to show you how the performance of the website is in the sense of like the commercial performance or how many people came to the site and did they add to cart and what products did they look at and did they check out, etc. But they haven't told you, did the page load in a time frame that was, you know, relevant to that consumer on the other end? And did all of the components of that customer experience that you're often paying for, right, with maybe third-party apps, et cetera, did everything actually load, get orchestrated, and come together to have that really compelling experience? And so that's the first foundational element, right, is putting in what we call real user monitoring. So not synthetic tests, which can be an example like that, or using a Lighthouse score, even the Shopify performance score built into the tools, right? But really looking at, in aggregate, all of your shoppers, how are they hitting the site? How many of them are getting a homepage that's loading in three seconds or less, right? Is it the majority or not? What's really interesting, so what we've done is we've got about 2,000 sites running Yota today, some of them leveraging our free analytics tools and some of them leveraging us for full optimization to accelerate the site. But the loading of that page is actually the culmination of your themes, the templates that you've either taken or customized from your Shopify store as well as all the third-party apps that you've added. And what we see on the Shopify customers that we work with, believe it or not, on average, there's almost 60 third-party apps added to their site experience. So when you think about that, right, even if you've picked one of the greatest themes out there, one of the most performant themes, and you had, maybe whether it was in-house developers or a really great agency supporting you, they might have created just a beautiful, high-performing website, both mobile desktop but then you still have all these other development teams that you don't really think about. And it's from these third-party apps. And sometimes they're beacons for analytics or ad tech and things of that nature. But more often it's things that you've added to create a more compelling customer experience, right? Whether it's those product recommendations, You know, various personalization tools, something that maybe puts your products together in certain ways, you know, and all of those begin to add up. And that's the piece that a lot of companies miss. And so where we come in is we've really been purpose-built for this era where we saw a trend early on with e-commerce, particularly as the tag manager was introduced. The Tag Manager kind of came out and it made it really easy for marketers to deploy almost anything. And then you look at the innovation from Shopify with the App Store. I mean, it is just phenomenal how easy it is, right? And I'm very excited having something in the App Store. But when I think about it from the merchant side, it's like you can try something new with a click of a button, right? Well, that's great. But then how well does it perform with everything else you have on the site? And is everything working together? And is it loading in the right way? And in some cases, does it even have the commercial cumulative positive effect that you were hoping for? So where Yoda kind of came to be was early days starting off working at the edge and really focused on accelerating that content to the customer, to the browser. And we still have a lot of great capability there. But then it was also looking at what's happening with all these third-party apps and the website itself and how can we make it come together like an orchestra instead of like maybe a high school band falling out of a school bus. And that's really the difference between sites that are, you know, using Yoder or not. Speaker 2: I think an important part that you mentioned there is that there are still a lot of factors that can slow down your site. I think Shopify sort of miscommunicated when Online Shopping 2.0 came out that the problem that they had in the past, you install an app, you de-install an app, and there's junk code left over which will slow your site. That problem is solved. That does not solve the problem that the third-party supplier still might be slow. So as a merchant, not as a developer, as a merchant, what should be the next step? Speaker 1: Well, you know, even on that first part, it's interesting because while that cleanup part has been improved, there are still a lot of merchants that get things onto their site through various other methods, right? It could be a developer that's putting something in at the source code level, right, building into the template, and you have that even increasingly as some try to do, you know, their own storefronts as well, right, in that kind of headless fashion. And then some are using the Tag Manager to deploy things too. So one of the first things we can do for companies is we can give them that audit. Do you really know what's running on your site? And not only what's running, but is it running everywhere that you want it to run? For example, you may have chosen something to only be on the homepage, but did it end up scattered throughout every page because it got pushed out as part of the whole theme? So we can first give that audit and actually show here are all the third parties and even first part things, things that you've been added that you may or may not know that we're running. And we give that inventory and some ongoing governance so that you actually know what's going. And oftentimes there are surprises where they think, that's not supposed to be there. We took that off months ago. We thought we did. And it's like, well, it's still on these pages. You just didn't know it. So there's that foundation element. And then the next step is moving into optimization. So really that's where we start to focus next is like, okay, how can we orchestrate that experience to be a lot faster, a lot better? And, you know, I made the joke about, you know, the difference between the sound of a great orchestra or the great orchestra conductor versus, you know, some kids falling off a bus. But that's partly what we do as well is when a site is optimized by Yoda, When that customer is hitting this Shopify store, we are right there helping to make sure that everything is loading in a certain way. One analogy we've used is it can be like a nightclub or something. Imagine opening a nightclub. If you have all of your VIP guests go first, I knock at the door before staff is there, you've even opened up, you're going to have a mess, right? You've got to get your employees in first, get the place cleaned up, bartenders are there, you know, and even some of your staff, right? Well, that may be some of your key analytics engines, beacons, things like that that may be needed for something to report out or it might even be like your personalization engines, right? Making sure that you're going to have a best report. And then it's about knowing what to sequence. And where to load each individual third-party app. You know, if you're trying to get someone off a campaign, maybe they're coming in from an ad you bought on Facebook or something you're doing on TikTok and you are driving them to a landing page or a product listing page, you know, do you need everything loading there or do you want everything loading up front before even your product information is loaded for that campaign? So a lot of what we do is optimize how things load. We can sequence things in a way that makes it a lot faster while also making sure it works. A lot of times, companies that get into this bloated state where they have too much stuff running on their site and they know it's a performance problem, the first instinct is to have a developer, either one in-house or maybe an agency partner, just start deferring things. Well, let's load the basic store template and then we'll load all the third parties. Okay, but again, you purchased something to create that personalized experience and if the page is loading before the personalization engine gets to run and take into consideration my purchase history or inventory or things like my location, then you're not creating the customer experience you want. And so that's really where we step in and try to solve it to make sure you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. Speaker 2: Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply like, comment, and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter Shopify merchant in just 7 minutes per week. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your e-commerce game with the latest news, insights and trends. Every Thursday in your inbox, 100% free. Join now at newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. That is newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. It makes perfect sense. Now, site speed optimization is not only about usability. It's also about conversion rates because at the end of the day, that's what you want. Can you give me some examples or numbers on how the impacts can be? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fairly surprising. I've been in the e-commerce space for over 20 years now in different capacities. I've had roles where I've been, like some of your guests, in an operator role on an e-commerce team. I've been in cases where I've been on the agency side, SI, building experiences, and then also in roles like to this where I'm trying to bring solutions to market for e-commerce leaders. And the thing that really surprised me is how big this problem is and how much it adds up to the impact on your revenue. And today, we're going to talk about a couple of metrics that we look at, right? You, of course, start with your traffic. That's your denominator. And you think about, how am I going to get traffic? I've got, you know, organic traffic that I'm going to try to inspire. I've also got paid traffic and social, etc. And then once I get that traffic there, I'm trying to have it be productive, right? Not bounce out. I want folks to get to know my brand, get to know my products, add something to cart, go through an order, checkout, and have, you know, a traditional conversion. And increase that overall revenue per session, a visitor of the website. But when you have so many other things kind of stepping in front of that customer experience sometimes, it can actually impact it quite a bit. And on average, it is, those third parties are about 75% of the page load time. So as you can imagine, if it's that great of a proportion of it, it's going to have a pretty big impact to your conversion rates too. We have seen, you know, oftentimes conversion rate lifts of, you know, 6% to 12% with just some slight adjustments there to how things load because they have such a big draw on it. And then other times, you know, it's much bigger. Seventy percent of performance issues are actually typically these third-party components. A lot of folks think it's the code that they own and that, you know, whether the theme or some templates that they've used or they've modified, etc. But it's actually the vast majority of these third parties. And so, once we get that really humming, then you can really start to drive some lifts in the conversion. And we actually look at conversion in a few different ways because we can model it out over Today, we're going to talk about what happens at different time intervals. On the one hand, within e-commerce teams, you often have the age-old sales versus marketing. The e-commerce person focuses on their conversion metric, marketing is trying to get traffic to the site, etc., and then they're all pointing to each other why there are more sales. But in that, you know, a lot of it is figuring out, okay, how are we going to create these experiences but get it loaded and get them through? And so we can do things that also, you know, turns things off and make it so that, you know, maybe on the cart page, not everything is firing that needs to, you know, be firing on a campaign landing page, for example. So there's a lot that can be done there. But what's interesting is how long a brand has changes. So, we talk about kind of the mythical three-second rule in the industry, and it's definitely well-supported by a lot of data, but it's not for every brand. So, what I would also offer, you know, for the marketing folks listening in, because I've had these debates many times with folks on both sides, you know, there is that kind of that give and take of, Well, I want a really compelling homepage. I want it to be, you know, exceptionally beautiful, et cetera, right? And so maybe you want videos running, you've got the really big imagery, you know, hero marquees that are full-page things, right? And I've had CMOs that have chased those dreams and I've had others that have kind of pretty lean commerce experiences that you can tell the salesperson won over on the design, right? But there are ways to doing both and it does actually depend on your customer. And so if you think about the products that you might sell, if you've got a high consideration product, well, then you're going to want more storytelling. You're going to want a richer experience because you've got to get them through that consideration phase. And so, what we show in our data is actually that conversion rates will change by brands and by segments and what you bring to market. So, for example, you know, a brand like that's selling a high-consumption product, but is it, you know, maybe like a luxury brand or something, their customers might actually give them four to five seconds on average before the bounce rates really start to spike. Now, on the other hand, if you are a merchant that is mostly selling a product that is purchasable elsewhere, like maybe Amazon or other retailers, You get a much smaller window of forgiveness for that site speed and your conversion zone to really optimize those sales might be at two seconds. And so that's another thing that we work on is brand to brand, depending on how you go to market, what your customer relationship is, what needs to be optimized for that. Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of very valuable advice in there and it shows you that you're in the business for a long time. A very similar experience on my side. So for our listeners, listen to this twice. There is a lot of gold nuggets in there when you look at your own site. If you're a marketing or a salesperson, there's a lot of truth in there. Now, obviously, to come up to conclusions there, you need to have a bit of data. What's the amount of data you need before you really can make a good result or give good advice on what to optimize? Speaker 1: Yeah, that is always the hardest challenge and it really, as you know, depends on the traffic to the site and orders. So what we try to do, you know, is really customize to each merchant and they usually know their customer and their traffic, but we try to always help make a data-driven decision. That's really our model for optimizing digital experience. Not only what part we may play a role in, but anything else going on out there. So it can really range depending on obviously traffic and order volumes, but one of the ways we go into this is we offer pilots to customers to see what optimized with Yoda is like, what the results are against unoptimized, and we can feed that data back into like Google Analytics or other places. So it could be a very data-driven decision. A lot of times that only takes a couple weeks to hit something that would be known in the industry as statistically significant. Some companies, maybe on the smaller side, could even be large revenue brands, but maybe they have big cycles in the calendar year of when they have lots of sales, when not, depending on the order volume. It might take a few weeks. It might even take a month. And then with some of those customers, a lot of what we do is It's pretty obvious how big a lift the performance is when you have us optimize those pages because we can actually show immediately with the analytics data that, hey, this page is now loading 30-40% faster. And that's through our low averages. That's like our median. We have a lot of sites that will, again, as you know, can come back to, well, will those templates design and the themes working, et cetera. But it could be as high as like 60%. And so then we have to make the argument, especially in this kind of economy, right, of everyone's trying to figure out, like, all right, what should I really be adding right now that's going to take advantage of my organic traffic and hopefully produce a different result? And so we can give some trials there. We can also just back into it later and make some commitments on the SLA front, etc. But usually the model is to let the merchant try it out and see the performance, and then we will show a continuous impact. And then throughout the relationship with our customers, we do usually about a 90-9-1 or 90-10 split. Where we continuously show, hey, here is customers that were to your site that got the fast experience optimized, and then you can look at things like, here was the conversion rate and the revenue per sessions and all that. And then here are customers that weren't. And so there's that continuous proof point, which is a big part of our relationship with our customers. Speaker 2: What I like on Yotta is that it really integrates with Shopify. So it's a site speed performance tool that really works within Shopify with the data coming through there. And I think I haven't heard about anyone else doing that. I think it's a huge benefit on using this. Now, who's your perfect customer? Who should use it? Speaker 1: So, you know, ultimately it's a brand that has some good sales. It's going through, you know, their site. So we are looking at more companies that are doing, you know, 5, 10, 10 plus million online sales revenue, their GMV. But it also can be companies that might have larger revenue outside, but their site may not be a primary channel from a revenue perspective, but it's important for them that it has a great customer experience. We see that a lot with brands where they may sell through traditional retail channels. Brand manufacturers, but then the site is truly important to them because they're okay if someone's standing in a Lowe's and buys that barbecue, but they definitely, if that consumer's hitting their website and looking at their product detail page to get more information, whether or not they convert on that page or not, they want that there. So we support both those, but it's in that kind of $10 million and above GMV. And from below there, we have a great app store offering and the free analytics as well. Speaker 2: Sounds great. How does the onboarding process work? Speaker 1: It's really fast. So that is also, I think, one of the blessings and the curses, as we've described, of Shopify and how easy it is to get something deployed. We're in that bucket. We can click some buttons in the app store and we get deployed and we can work with the team to get deployed at the source as well, with the developer. But we're ultimately just a single JavaScript tag. And then we can bring a lot of this capability to life. Usually, it's minutes and hours, and we're set up and running and optimizing. It takes a lot longer, though, to get through the cycle of the decision-making to do, should I turn it on or not, and getting contracts at NDA side. But the nice thing is it's fast. So, if you've got folks out there that are thinking about their back-to-school, prepping for holiday, we've had a lot of companies, believe it or not, even right up to peak. Where they realize, you know, they worked all summer, they deployed some new experience, maybe a new theme, changed the homepage, whatever it was, and it's, you know, not performing, and we can quickly turn on for them and give them a little bit of a boost, which is nice, because I think if, you know, you're e-commerce leader right now, and someone can give you a 5 plus percent conversion lift with flipping a switch, you know, that really adds up, right? And we've had some big stories in that way. You know, one of our Larger Shopify customers, Perry Ellis, they achieved a 15% lift in conversion when they turned us on. And that was from a 37% improvement in site speed after they turned us on. And we've had a number of companies in that kind of same boat where those, man, it's fast to implement. One customer said it was the best bang for their buck at one of our employee kickoff meetings this year. And they were like, we were fighting themes. And template changes for over a year trying to hone the performance. And if we just knew all we had to do is flip a switch, we would have done that a long time ago. But, you know, there's a combination of both, right? Getting the third parties figured out and then also leveraging analytics tools like us to also see where else you can draw improvement from in those templates. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think site speed performance optimization is one of the lowest hanging fruits that you can go to to improve your conversions there. Speaker 1: Especially right now, I mean, if you think about the cost of advertising, right, and the return on ad spend has dropped, everyone's trying to figure out, how do I make my organic traffic perform better? And I think this is a great area to focus on, is start sitting down and huddling around site performance. Speaker 2: Give me a bit of an overview about the pricing. How do you charge for the service? Speaker 1: We charge based on page views. We're a little bit like a utility, electricity service kind of thing, where we've got to run some activity on every one of those page views. But we have a couple of different ways to tier that out, but it's basically just on page views. It's a pretty simple rating algorithm, and then, you know, you can, again, we'll show that performance lift. And usually we have payback periods that are usually measured in weeks, which is pretty nice, you know, months at worst. So that's kind of the fun part. As I shared with you earlier, like one of the I'm very excited about what we do because we've got one of those products where it does what we say it does and we can bring you on the journey and you can get your business really optimized real fast. But it's reaching out and catching folks and letting them know that A, site performance is important. Let's get it prioritized. Let's get it on the project list. And then B, there are some quick win areas that you can actually take advantage of right now to help out. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think right now is the best time to start so that you're ready in Q4. Where can people find out more about Jota? Speaker 1: Head to yotta.com, Y-O-T-T-A-A dot com, or check us out on the App Store as well. Turn it on, take a spin, and we'd love to talk to anyone that wants to learn more about site speed. We're happy to do some evaluations as well. We have a great performance engineering team that does a lot of quick evals and audits for companies that are just trying to figure out where they're at, so we can do that as well. Speaker 2: For our listeners, I will put the links in the show notes. As always, you're just one click away. Darin, thanks so much for giving us an overview on the importance of site speed. I'm a big fan of everything that can be optimized on that site. As I said, it's an easy win, and sometimes you find golden nuggets that you're not aware of. Thanks so much for your time today. Comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter online seller in just 5 minutes. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you to stay on top of your e-commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends twice a week in your inbox, 100% free. Join now at newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. That's newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.