The Impact Of Page Load Speed On Checkout

🚨 Founders, PMs & Marketers Reminder: if you're focused on CAC, creatives, and funnels, but ignoring site/app performance, you're paying for it but you just don't know it. 🧨 Speed is still the silent killer of conversion. Some 2025 data: ⚡️ 63% of users bounce if a page takes over 4 seconds to load (Portent, 2025) 📱 A 1 second improvement on mobile drives a 3% lift in conversions (Google/SOASTA) 💸 Sites that load in 1 second convert up to 5x better than those that load in 10 (Deloitte Digital) If your checkout is 2 to 3 seconds and your competitor’s is sub-1, you're losing customers before they even click. 📊 Where things stand in 2025 Site/App performance is no longer just a dev concern. It’s a growth lever. Reducing mobile load time by just 1 second boosts conversions by nearly 6% and cuts bounce by 9% (Deloitte Digital, 2025 update) Even a 1 second delay can cause a 7% drop in conversions (Think with Google) Google still recommends a 2–3 second load time for best-in-class e-commerce performance 🛒 Checkout friction still hurts Cart abandonment is stuck around 70% and checkout lag is a major factor (Baymard Institute) BigCommerce data shows frictionless flows meaningfully improve conversion Click-to-Pay has been shown to shave 20 seconds off the process, cut fraud by 91%, and lift conversion by around 10% ([Business Insider, 2025]) 💬 What I keep seeing Plenty of teams are sitting on 2 to 3 second load times in the most critical funnel points—checkout, onboarding, trial setup. It feels fast enough, but it’s driving up CAC and suppressing conversion. In some cases, cleaning up performance delivered a better CAC drop than any new campaign. 🔧 Where to look right now 📏 Audit your load times on mobile and desktop 📉 Clean up image weight, unused JS, API delays 📈 Run a correlation between load speed, conversion, and CAC—you’ll likely be surprised 💡 Bottom line Speed still converts. If your CAC is creeping and everything else looks solid, your load time might be the leak. Sometimes the fix isn’t another ad. It’s shaving a few hundred milliseconds off your flow.

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sukita Tapadia, CMO at The Pant Project—and it felt like sitting in a masterclass on tactical marketing. 30–40% jump in add-to-carts. 50% improvement in conversion rate. Organic traffic up after 18 months of plateau. All from two obsessions: page speed and buyer psychology. Every morning, her team watches session recordings using tools like Hotjar and Clarity. They study user stalls, exit points, and scroll depth—then ship micro-fixes. They found users getting distracted, so they simplified the website to reduce decision fatigue, especially for male shoppers. Their strategy going ahead: Fewer categories. Cleaner UI/UX. Focus on page speed (brought to under 2.5 seconds) That alone pushed conversions to a 50% increase for ready-to-wear. This isn’t gut-feel marketing. It’s structured. Iterative. Data-obsessed. 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀: 🔷Page speed isn’t just a tech metric. It directly impacts revenue. After bringing load times below 2.5 seconds, conversion rates increased by 50%.  🔷Assuming your customers have heard enough of you is a mistake. There is so much stuff on the internet that it is easy for your message to get lost. By surrounding the user with consistent, repeated messaging, they made The Pant Project the default choice for customers.  🔷  New customers don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Sukita applies “trust transfer” to remove that hesitation. Every touchpoint—ads, testimonials, product quality, influencer content—builds trust so that a new customer feels safe making the switch. 🎙 This is just a preview. The full episode drops Friday—watch out for it.

Slow websites kill conversions. Not long ago, a brand came to us struggling. Their traffic was strong, but sales were stagnant. Customers were abandoning their carts, bounce rates were high, and revenue wasn’t where it should be. The culprit? A slow-loading website. Every extra second it took for their pages to load was costing them potential sales. The reality is that online shoppers have little patience. Studies show that even a 1-second delay can cause a 7% drop in conversions. If your checkout process lags, customers will leave. If your product pages take too long to load, they’ll go to a competitor. The good news? Speed optimization isn’t just about fixing a slow site—it’s about unlocking higher conversions and better user experience. Here’s how to do it: - Compress images and optimize code to reduce load times - Invest in high-performance hosting and implement proper caching - Simplify your UX to ensure a seamless, fast checkout experience This particular brand took action, and within weeks, their site speed improved, bounce rates dropped, and sales went up. If your ecommerce store is slow, so is your revenue growth. Speed it up before your customers leave for good. Need help optimizing your website? Let’s talk. AbsoluteWeb.com