Just like Google searches done on a desktop, as of July, mobile searches now also consider speed. The Silicon Valley company has indeed expressed that mobile content, even if very relevant, will be bumped down the search engine’s results pages if it takes too long to load.
It is commonly accepted that a page’s loading speed has a strong impact on conversion rates, and as a result, on the overall performance of online sales. With this announcement, Google takes a step further by stating that a mobile site with poor web performance will lose visibility by being less well referenced. The direct result is a reduction in the number of visits to the site. Online sales numbers are directly linked to these two factors, so a site’s profitability hangs in the balance.

In June 2017, 56% of visits to websites in France were made from a mobile device (source DN/Médiamétrie and eStat), so online retailers should not just think “mobile first” but “fast mobile first”, or they risk jeopardizing their sales volumes. The American giant’s decision to demand good user experience will require online retailers to change in step.

With this change, e-merchants must therefore work to improve their mobile web performance. More than 500 online businesses have already followed the steps below to avoid being relegated to the famous search engine’s lower ranks:

1/ Identify Your Key Pages
Google is a major source of traffic for e-commerce sites. Based on what they search and Google’s index, web users won’t  all land on the same page. It is therefore best to first identify the pages upon which users most frequently land, and then focus your efforts on those ones first. The most cost-effective and pragmatic approach is to take note of the most important pages for your business and concentrate on them.

2/ Compare the Speed of Your Key Pages To Those of Your Competitors
By using Google’s automatic test page, you can compare your site to that of your competitors. When the test is complete, you just have to select your industry to see if you are one of the good or bad students.

3/ Optimize
Among the most important recommendations:
– Use a cache system (CDN)
– Enable compression on your server
– Compress and resize images in order to provide the user with content that is always perfectly tailored to their device

The list of optimizations to complete (and to maintain over time!) is long. Google also
provides PageSpeed Insights, a tool you can use to determine if the improvements you implement on your site are making an immediate effect.

4/ Monitor
An e-commerce site is a complex and perpetually moving machine. Every week, your site undergoes several changes that may lead to unexpected slowdowns or disruptions. If these performance problems are not identified and corrected before Google next analyzes your site, they can have serious repercussions on your site’s ranking. Implementing a system of continuous measurement, slowdown identification, and alerting is therefore necessary for your site’s long-term success.

L’article Google Speed Update: When Web Performance Impacts SEO, How Do You Ensure Your Mobile Site is Up to Speed? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

L’article Why using a CDN is critical to your web performance est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Our analysis focused on business elements (conversion rate, page views, turnover, etc.) and their technical implications, by comparing the activity of 450 sites on the first day of the sales period VS the average metrics recorded the day before the beginning of the sales. Well, it’s safe to say that we had some surprises. ^^

The great upheaval

As early as 8 am, the indicators began to rocket. At the end of the day, the turnover registered an average increase of + 359%!

This end result was the combination of several factors:

More visits

Many visitors meet, that day, on the exact same time slot as early as from 8 am (+ 155% of sessions).

More pages viewed

Visitors click more on this one day, and go further in their sales funnel (+ 182% of additional page views per visit).

Better conversion rate

The prices are more attractive and the Internet users are competing with each other to “seize” the best deals, so the conversion rate is also above normal (+ 38% on average).

That is how the combination of all these factors (more visitors, who go further in the sales tunnel, and thus buy more) has led to this +359% global increase in sales.

Congratulations to all for these results. 😉

But do not think it is simple to get there. These results were made possible thanks to a good management of the load by the platform, kept almost the whole time in operational conditions. One could even go further by talking about optimal conditions, ie the platform held the charge, at the peak of traffic, with page load times as fast as in the off-peak periods.

Small reminder on this point: in the ecommerce world, every 100ms of additional loading time impacts the final conversion rate. That is, if a site is slowed down by 2s per page during the first morning of sales period, you can expect it to register 20% less than predicted!

By analyzing the measures recorded on the hosting infrastructures during that same morning of sales, it’s easy to grasp the magnitude of the difficulty encountered by any emerchant who is preparing for a strong traffic on the day of the sales.

A technical challenge for estores

Because, yes, the very good results that the ecommerce sites recorded during the sales have a significant technical cost for the infrastructures.

Increased demand for infrastructure

Metrics showed this summer a +149% CPU load increase on french ecommerce infrastructures. This increase can be easily explained by the execution of the order processing and the CMS code (whether it is based on Magento, Prestashop, OroCommerce, or even a “home” solution).

What does it tell us ? From this number we can say that in order to keep a little room for mishaps on the infra, and to withstand this sudden increase in the load, it is often necessary for the emerchants to have 4 times more infrastructure on the D-Day, than on the rest of the year. On a so-called “fixed” infrastructure, this amounts to paying a quadruple capacity compared to its average need, and just for… 2 days in the year (the first day of the winter and summer sales) ! You can understand easily why elastic (or cloud) infrastructures have the wind in their sails at the moment.

To correctly anticipate the provisioning of infrastructures before the D-Day, the most recommended option remains the implementation of upstream load tests. On the subject, if you have any questions about how to set up these tests, do not hesitate to read our article dedicated to this matter.

Greater response times during peak traffic

There was a +44% increase in page response time, demonstrating that despite the addition of supplementary infrastructures for the D-Day, some users are still suffering from unoptimized and slower-than-usual software processing, hence the importance of:

• Upstream optimization,
• Load tests (yes. Again!),
• And caches at all levels => varnish, cache block, …etc.

What does a 44% increase in response times represents, you say?

With an average of 600ms of page rendering time (this is the time for our panel of measured websites), a user has a navigation experience of an additional 250ms of loading times with each click, on the morning of sales period.

According to various studies, including that of the star, Amazon, 250ms of additional loading time is equivalent to about 2.5% of turnover loss. For the entire French ecommerce, it is therefore several million euros that can be lost in a single day, if the anticipation on traffic peaks is not properly carried out!

Indeed, there is a combination of a slowed time precisely on a day when the turnover is much higher, the effects of speed on conversion are thus multiplied.

This analysis of the summer 2017 sales shows how closely the commercial success of a website is linked to its technical preparation in many aspects:

• The availability (an unavailable site does not sell anything and deteriorates the image of a brand),
• The speed (each 100ms counts for the conversion rate … and the SEO too),
• And how the infrastructure handles the load in general

In other words, this shows that success and web performance are intimately linked when talking about ecommerce.

See you soon in January 2018 for an upcoming analysis of the next french biggest peak of activity of the year. But by then, do not hesitate to contact us for an expert advice during your preparation.

L’article French Summer Sales 2017 – Health status of the ecommerce websites est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

However, as the technology in this areas becomes more and more particular, Heads of Marketing tend to multiply the apps they’re using and the companies they work with. Instead of doing everything internally, they tend to build their marketing castle with bricks from their own teams, a web agency, an SEO agency, and their hosting services.

As a result, they can easily loose sight of the big picture, of who is doing what exactly, thus leaving them clueless regarding the priorities to be set in order to continue their growth.

But that’s a thing of the past. Not unlike Neo in “The Matrix”, they are more and more eager to choose the red pill, and finally take back control. They want to know what’s truly going on with their website, in all its aspects and specifics. They don’t want to be confined to a distant overseer position that doesn’t understand the technical challenges that an online store presents, and rely too heavily on others opinions to decide what’s good or bad for the future of the business.

So, hop into the Nebuchadnezzar, and take back control of your website’s processes, with the following 3 tips.

You will attract more visitors if you know who they are

Firstly, if you want to attract more visitors to your store, you have to target them specifically. No more nets thrown haphazardly in the big sea of the internet. You should start by analyzing the profile of your customers and understand what their origin is.

Some marketers leave this analysis to external agencies. These agencies collect the data and then paint a portrait of the typical customer. But that’s not the only solution.

Other marketers use attribution tools to take back control of their data and due the analysis internally. This allows managers to see how visitors find their website and what lead them to buy. More precisely, an attribution tool assesses if a marketing campaign is successful or not.

Take a well known attribution tool like Mazeberry for example. It displays performance indicators, and sort all the data it receives in order to identify the most valuable indicators for you to use. Google Analytics, and Bizible are also interesting for this task or Merchandising.io for a more specific “product performance” view.

Managing an advertisement process efficiently can greatly help cut back the customer acquisition costs, so attribution tools can become a powerful asset in a marketers toolbox. They can reduce the customer acquisition costs by up to 15%.

You really need to schedule the publication of your content

Now that you are able to track the origin of your visitors and to know which meta-tags you should improve, you must keep your visitors on your website.

But these users have a limited amount of time to dedicate to your site, and are likely to visit at a particular time of day. Given this, scheduling the moment you post your content into their mailbox can really improve customer retention. However, to do this, you will need to dive into some metrics to understand what and when to reach your prospect as a way to have a maximum of impact in a minimum of time.

And that’s when automation tools really comes in handy. 😀

Usually, these tools will give you precise indicators to identify the marketing channels (emailing campaign, social networks, paid publicity, …etc.) that bring the most visitors / customers / leads to your website.

They also allow you to preset messages to post on the best-known social media sites, manage your emailing campaigns, …etc. An automation tool like HubSpot, for example, even offers you automatically to post on the most relevant time (determined by the results of your previous marketing campaigns)! But it’s not the only name in the field. Datananas, IKO System, Hatchbuck, Hubspot or Marketo are also great options as automation tools.

If used correctly, these tools greatly increase the chances of conversion.

You need good analytics to know if each page is Web Performant

An online store has to be updated regularly, to add new articles or change some prices for instance. But the more your website grows, the more you put yourself at risk of experiencing slowdowns and unavailability periods. Also, a slow website usually entails a deteriorated customer experience (Well yeah! Nobody likes to wait long when shopping online!), and we all know that, that it leads to a significant loss of visitors, and thus, of sales.

And that’s when you enter the world of web performance and optimization.

You want to expand your online store, and attract more and more customer, but without losing any speed or quality of UX? Well optimization is there for you.

But before optimizing your website, you need to find out where do the issues come from.

“Should I focus on the homepage, or the cart first?” “Are my web developers responsible, or my hosting provider?” To answer those questions, you may want to use a piloting tool. These tools will allow you to monitor your store and extract the data relating to the performance of your website. This is the purpose of tools like Google Analytics, Pingdom, Dareboost, Blackfire (a tool with a definite “tech/dev” vibe, that goes very deep into application optimizations) or Quanta.

As an piloting tool, Quanta extracts both real user data (using Google Analytics) and backend, frontend and server metrics from e-commerce websites, analyses it, and identify the root cause of the slowdowns. The tool, intended for Heads of E-commerce and Marketing Managers, aims at helping you prioritize the best-suited optimizations needed for your website, by presenting the data in clear business dashboards, with actionable indicators.

So that’s it for these 3 tips to take back control of your e-commerce business growth!

Now you are truly ready to set aside the blue pill, and delve into the truth of your data. To take good decisions, don’t be afraid to delve into the technicalities of your website anymore, and check out these solutions, as they will help you concentrate on your real job: managing your team and your development strategy.

L’article Heads of E-commerce, it’s time to choose the red pill! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

It’s not that until then, no new features were created; but up to this point, our amazing (yes, amazing!) tech team has been working in the shadows. But, no more. No more! From now on, we’re going to tell, loud and clear, all of our amazing team’s feats.

So, for this week’s new features, we’re going to talk about the new “Dashboards” menu (signaled by this icon ), which contains the Business, and Favorites tabs.

Without further ado, let’s push ahead!

Dashboards : Business

The first new feature on our agenda today is: the Business dashboard.

From now on, in QUANTA, you’ll find a new menu, called “Dashboards”, with two different tabs in it. And the first one, as you’ve guessed, is “Business”.

The Business dashboard features 4 different widgets, essentials to the marketing experts, head of e-commerce, and other business moguls:

• Turnover: Using past and current turnover data, this widget estimates the turnover loss due to slow page load times, and downtime. Simply said, the Turnover widget helps visualise the loss in income, due to unavailability and slow response of the website. It is a useful widget when trying to estimate the cost of a technical incident on the online store.

• E-commerce sales funnel: It’s quite simple actually! This widget monitors the availability and average response time, of each step of the classic sales funnel (Home > Category > Subcategory > Product > Cart, for those who weren’t following 😉 ) on your website. As we’ve said before (and we’re not the only ones to say that, Google and Amazon did before us!), time is money. And in terms of e-commerce, longer loading times equal to loss of money. So it is a must to monitor the web performance of each step of the sales funnel, simply put, to keep customers.

• Top pages : It lists the top 10 most viewed pages of your website thanks to Google Analytics, and estimates the additional revenue you could gain after optimization, based on their response time, traffic and a bit of our magic. For example, if your Home Page views turns out to represent 10% of your total viewed pages, then it is in your best interest to concentrate your optimization on it, in terms of SEO, load time, availability, …etc. 10% seems to be a small slice in the cake, but if optimizing it could result in thousands of euros in additional revenue, each year…

• Last incidents: This widget is a simple abstract of all the technical analysis that are already available in Quanta. If you don’t have time to look at all the graphs outlining problems with your CPU, ping time, server load, …etc., just sneak a peek at this widget and you’ll know exactly what was the uptime and downtime of your e-commerce website, during a given time period. Let’s be clear, if the numbers are in the red, then that means it’s high time to optimize web performance, and call in the experts of your tech team. This widget also estimates the loss due specifically to availability issues.

The Business dashboard is completely customizable. It allows you to easily get a quick glance at what interests you the most, whether it is availability (Last incidents widget), SEO ( Top pages  widget), …etc.

The gif below gives a quick tour of the Business dashboard so, enjoy it! But the best way to discover these 4 widgets and find out if they can be helpful in your daily tasks, just log in to your Quanta account and test it out.

Dashboards : Favorites

The idea behind the Favorites dashboard is to allow our users to draw a parallel between seemingly unrelated graphs from our monitoring tool.

Let me explain.

In Quanta, you can find analysis, on any number of subjects, technicals or not. This different analysis are then classified under several tabs: Availability, Performance, Load Tests, Business, Network, System and Web scenarios. But these tabs are just a matter of organisation and presentation.

If you want to draw a parallel between the Transaction revenue per minute (Business tab) and the Average load time per page (Web Scenarios tab), and the Availability (Availability tab), because you’re smart and want to find out how much the last incident cost you !!!!!, then you just have to tag these 3 graphs as Favorites, and find them displayed in the Favorites dashboard.

There, you’ll be able to analyze them precisely, identify technical problems, and demonstrate to your marketing and technical teams the link between a well maintained and optimized website, and a comfortable profit.

If you want a quick tutorial on the Favorites dashboard, just have a look at the gif below.

And with this, our tour of this week’s new features comes to an end! I really hope you liked it, and that you’ll find our new marketing-oriented features to be of interest.

Two blog posts on new more technical features will follow, because we’ll soon do a piece on PHP 7 / Magento 2 / and other surprises, and a more thorough one on the Varnish 4 update.

And keep in mind that everything you need to know about how to use Quanta is explained here!

L’article What’s Up Quanta #7 – Here come the new Dashboards est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

ETAM’s page speed load time reduced by 700 ms

Etam is a luxury lingerie brand among the top 5 sites using Magento in France, with over 200 million page views per year. When we met with Etam’s website managers, their site only had a 1.2 second page speed loading time. Not really shocking at first sight. It is common to see e-commerce shops charge slowly. There is a lot of space for optimisation.

With the support of Quanta monitoring and tracking solution, the load time of Etam’s online store has been reduced to 500 ms, thus saving 700 ms. This may seem like only a slight gain but if we multiply the time saved, by the number of page loads  per year (200 million),that makes 4.4 years of waiting time saved! This is HUGE!

It shows how a small win has ultimately a strong impact in a global context. Imagine… 4.4 years of waiting time before a blank page while hoping for the desired page to be displayed!

By saving time, users enjoy a more comfortable navigation. They take advantage of a better UX and are therefore inclined to see more pages, interact more strongly, and will thus subtly go further in the sales funnel! E-shopping is no longer a stress but instead a nice ”ride” from the browser. Are they more likely to buy at the end of the funnel? Yes.

The impact of improved speed on ETAM performance

After optimisation, ETAM’s site has seen several of its indicators increase in Google Analytics:

• The number of page views per session has increased by 28%;
• The average time per visit increased by 21%;
• The conversion rate increased by 20%.

The optimisation work carried out by Baobaz agency and ETAM’s web team using the Quanta solution is a textbook case! Indeed, the brand now enjoys a site that is accessed faster, deeper, and transforms better. The effectiveness of the marketing team with the offers on and off-site is strengthened. Speed was the missing link to generate new sales and provide better visibility to the product range without any external action.

If you want to calculate your ROI linked to an action on your website’s speed, remember that Quanta offers diagnostic performance of your Magento website. Our experts will then connect to your site and make an initial assessment with you, letting you know the  percentage of conversion possible to aim for.

L’article ETAM earns 20% of conversion by optimising its online store est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

In fact, Google thinks that site speed is an important factor. Google has an obsession with the speed of loading pages and has always rewarded sites that have their own codes and that load quickly. Since 2011, a tool has even been offered to help webmasters speed up their sites. But what is the real impact of speed on SEO?

Good speed is necessary to make service available to users

Google places a premium on sites that load quickly. Why so? Because the American giant wants to make service available to users. A good service must be available quickly. “At Google, we strive to make the entire the web faster.” It must be understood that Google’s own philosophy is based on speed. The search engine assumes that a user must quickly find the information they are looking for or product they want to purchase. Clearly, the less time he spends on the search engine, the more quickly he accesses his request, the more satisfied he is.

You understand it: when you want to retain visitors on your e-commerce store, Google tries to get people off of their site as soon as possible.

Good speed allows improving users’ experience

Does having a fast site guarantee ending up at the top of SERPs? No. The search results are not a function of loading time. The speed of your site is a parameter among several hundred that help to better reference you, but speed is essential because it affects other parameters that affect your SEO. It’s a cascading effect.

• The frustration of waiting: if the site loads slowly, then the visitor will leave. That will increase your bounce rate, reduce the duration of visit, and permanently alter your CTR. There are so many parameters that Googlemonitors for SEO.
• Technical constraints: to surf on a mobile means to navigate with a smaller screen and slower connection, the same happens if using a Wi-Fi hotspot at a reduced rate. By having a site that loads fast, you adapt to these technical constraints. Google acknowledges you.
• Economic (and ecological) constraints: a site that takes time to load is a waste of money (link) and a consumption of resources on the servers. By upstreaming efforts to improve speed, you reduce expenses and to a lesser degree, the impact on the environment. As soon as we start talking about money, Google pays attention.

L’article Is speed important for SEO? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Although each business is unique, we can find common reasons for these failures. Understanding these factors should help you defy the statistics and make your e-commerce a success.

Poor planning and forecasting

Good planning and market research are preconditions to build your e-commerce site. You should consider these factors and know if there really is a demand for your products online, what the figures from your competitors are, will your site be profitable and afterwards, for how long, etc …

Lack of differentiation

Most online retailers do not really present demarcation on their market; these businesses have a natural tendency to imitate their competitors. A tip: do not start in a market because everyone pitches in. Instead, define what makes your site unique.

Wanting to sell everything to everyone

Do not try to sell too many products initially, be honest with yourself and determine if you can afford to spend time managing the procurement, inventory, sales and after sales service of your products. The goal is to succeed in providing a great pay-for-value and an impeccable customer service.

Poor user experience

User experience must now be placed at the center of concerns for e-commerce sites and it must go through 4 components of the UX design:

• emotional (graphic communication)
• technical (performance and speed)
• statistics (analysis)
• ergonomic (User Interface)

Lack of quality content

The lack of content can have a very negative impact on your sales. In addition to its impact on the ranking of your site, your content (product sheets, blog articles, guides, descriptions …) should encourage prospects for consumption on your site. User comments and feedbacks(positive and even negative!) for example, could help you to gain prospect’s trust.

L’article The 5 main reasons for the failure of an e-commerce site est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Google itself says it: “A site that appears in a search result with a slow loading time in comparison to other sites that have a longer loading time, can be promoted. Conversely, sites with slower loading time can me demoted.” Here are 5 SEO tips to improve the speed of your site and get a Google “promotion.”

Optimize your database

Most sites use databases to store information. The weight of these can affect the speed of your pages. Adding an index is one of the best ways to find information more quickly. Some very long loading times, greater to 5 or 10 seconds, can be reduced to 1 or 2 seconds with a well-constructed index.

Clean up your code

You do not need five traffic analysis programs, or heavy codes for integrated videos, social widgets, etc… Remember that simplicity is key. Each time that you add another tracking code to your page, embedded videos, or any other element that requires a separate loading (such as iFrames), make your page heavy. The same goes for action buttons. Most sharing buttons are based on JavaScript and generate iFrame on the page. Use them with caution.

Use caching whenever possible

When you visit a website for the first time, your browser must request all the images, texts, and scripts from the site server. They are stocked in your browser’s cache such that when you visit other pages on the site, it will suffice to download the parts that are unique, but not the entire site. Local storage allows you to store megabytes of data using your visitors’ browser. The use of caching has two major advantages:

• Improving speed: the visitor accesses resources from his local computer and does not have to wait for the server to deliver all the content
• Savings: Since you increase your use of local storage, the use of your server will reduce. This means that you will pay for less bandwidth and less use of the server. Opt for a content deliver network (CDN).

Imagine that your website’s server is physically located in the Paris region. Your site will load quicker for locals because data have a shorter distance to travel from the server to the user. Now imagine a user that wants to visit your site from the United States. The data must travel across the Atlantic. Each image, each video, each JavaScript file, all CSS files, must travel. Wouldn’t it be great if a copy of the page could exist in a server in Paris and in the United States, both at once? That is exactly what a content deliver network (CDN) does.

Use Page Speed Insights

L’article 5 Tips for accelerating your site and improving the SEO est apparu en premier sur Quanta.