There are 3 metrics to pay attention to when testing a website’s load time & performance:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes for the largest image & text to load on the site. This is the most common way of measuring how long it takes for a site to be fully loaded for a visitor.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly a web page responds to any action performs on the website (i.e. clicking a button or typing).
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): this is a measure of how “stable” the website is when loading (i.e. do images load in and stay in place or do they shift up/down when loading in the website)
LCP, INP, and CLS are the most common metrics used when measuring website loading speed and performance. Together, these 3 have a strong impact on conversion rate, organic ranking, paid marketing performance, and overall customer experience.
Here are the benchmarks to aim for with LCP, INP, and CLS:
LCP — 2.5 seconds or less
INP — 200 milliseconds or less
CLS — 0.1 or less
Here is the LCP, INP, and CLS for Murad:
LCP
Mobile: 2.7 seconds
Desktop: 3 seconds
INP
Mobile: 189 ms
Desktop: 258 ms
CLS
Mobile: 0.03
Desktop: 0.02
The poor INP time on desktop means that the website is experiencing some input delay on desktop.
However, the main issue is that the website is taking too long to load.
The recommended LCP time — or how long it take the website to load — is <2.5 seconds.
Murad website is taking between 2.7 to 3 seconds to load on average.
This extra load time might seem minimal; however, ecommerce is a game of milliseconds.
53% of online shoppers will leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load (
Google mapped the relationship between loading time and conversion rates across 30 websites (900k landing pages in total) Notice how conversion rates dropped drastically for websites that took longer than 3 seconds to load 👇
Based on the site speed audit results, there are a handful of technical issues slowing down your website.
According to the site speed audit, the most prominent issue is the excess/unused JavaScript and CSS code present in the Murad website.
If you look at the screenshot below, there are 5 separate instances where excess/unused code is slowing down the website.
This is a very common issue that pops up in the ecommerce space — especially for website like Murad that are hosted on Shopify. Shopify sites can’t be run straight out of the box. They require dozens of app plugins and third party code (i.e. Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, TikTok Pixel, etc.) to do anything.
When you install one of these apps, it injects a small packet of unoptimized code into your website, slowing it down. Even if you uninstall the app, the code stays behind. Over time, this code will accumulate, hurting your website’s performance.
The best way to make the Murad website load faster is by optimizing it’s codebase.
During this process, a developer will cull through your website’s code and delete unused/depreciated JavaScript and CSS code — code that no longer serves any function for the website.
The developer will then optimize and streamline the remaining necessary JavaScript and CSS code so that it runs more efficiently.
This would also improve “main thread” operations — another technical issue slowing down the website (see screenshot below). The “main thread” is the order in which the browser loads the website. Streamlining the codebase helps the browser load it faster.
Research shows that even small improvements in your website’s loading time can drastically improve conversion rates.
1 second improvement in page load time will increase mobile CVR by up to 27% (
This is why major ecommerce brands will spend tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on their website’s performance.
At Roadrunner, we’ve seen ecommerce brands improve conversion rates by 50%+ by making their website load faster.
Making your website load faster does more than increase it’s conversion rate.
Improve search rankings: Google is a business too, and they are incentivized to give searchers the best user experience. That’s why site speed is an important ranking factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.
Increase paid marketing performance: faster loading websites will have a lower bounce rate than slower loading websites. Lower bounce rate means lower CPCs (platforms like Facebook and TikTok optimize for better user experiences) and lower CPAs.
More repeat customers: a poor user experience erodes trust and brand loyalty. Shopify found that 79% of customers are less likely to repurchase from an online store if they were “dissatisfied” with the site's speed.
to help ecommerce companies maximize their conversion rate through proper site speed optimization. To date, we’ve helped more than a dozen Shopify sites increase their CVR by 20-50% through site speed optimization.
If you’d like to learn more about our site speed optimization services: