Written by Shahil Bhimji

For online retailers, a slow-loading website can be disastrous. Poor online performance can cause significant issues affecting the overall customer experience.

The longer your page takes to load, the higher the chance that a customer will leave the site. As well as reputational damage, that poor user experience can result in fewer conversions and a loss of revenue.

We’ve been analysing website speed across UK eCommerce to test how pagespeed varies from site to site. Of all the sectors that we focused on, we’ve honed in on DIY using page load speed as a key indicator of performance. These well-known retailers are facing a unique set of challenges.

Lockdown factors

During lockdown, consumers were forced to stay at home. Three in four UK homeowners said they would use this extra time to complete home improvements. With the property market slowing down, more of us are improving our existing homes instead of moving. The impact of this is notable.

Over the past three months, DIY stores have experienced huge surges in demand. Online sales of plants, seeds and bulbs rose by 48.2%, building materials rose by 31.4% and paint by 47.1%. This put an enormous strain on business infrastructure to stock, dispatch and deliver in vast numbers across the UK. It also put crushing weight on eCommerce sites like never before.

If this data is to be taken at face value, the UK is experiencing a DIY boom. In May 2020, a 42% rise in sales in DIY goods stores was reported. This is in comparison to an overall rise in sales of 12% across all sectors. Research shows that the average customer spend in DIY stores has increased to £200, with one in ten customers intending to spend more than £500 per shop.

New digital challenges

For DIY leaders, the huge uplift in sales has presented new digital challenges. Page load performance might not have been a high priority before, but now is vitally important. DIY retailers would be well placed to start considering a future where more than half their purchases happen online.

With website speed likely to be a huge priority for retailers moving forwards, we evaluated a range of the UK’s top performing DIY retailers on pagespeed performance. What follows are some extracts of key measures based on our website speed tests. We’ve highlighted interesting trends that are likely to have an impact on bounce rate and rankings.

Our data indicate that page load times across some of the UK’s top DIY retailers vary considerably. Of the brands we looked at, Selco outperformed the rest. Its pages are visually ready in 2.1 seconds on average. In comparison, B&Q (www.diy.com) takes 15.68 seconds to be visually ready. Whilst Google is looking at Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) as its main criteria for pagespeed, we’ve adopted a more user-centric metric: Visually Ready. This is when 95% of the page is fully rendered ‘above the fold’ to the user. There is a direct correlation between Visually Ready and LCP and, as this is a core component of how sites will be ranked, top retailers cannot afford to have such poor pagespeeds.

Trends

We looked at comparable Product List pages across several different companies in retail DIY. Across the whole of this sector, we’re seeing a range of interesting trends.

At the top, Selco is the best-performing website. Its pages on a desktop are Visually Ready in 1.73 seconds, with a Total Blocking Time of 0.7 seconds. The page weight was just 0.59MB, taking 1.02 seconds for script execution. At the other end of the spectrum, B&Q was Visually Ready in 7.9 seconds, taking 6.17 seconds longer than Selco. Its Total Blocking Time was 2.3 seconds, with a page weight of 2.7MB. Script execution takes 3.93 seconds. The gap in performance between these two retailers is notable.

Across the entire sector on desktop First Visual Change varies from 0.5s to 15s and Visually Ready varies from 1.58s to 15.4s. On mobile, First Visual Change ranges from 1.5s to 7.7s and Visually Ready ranges from 2.19s to 22.8s. The number of requests ranges from 41 to 151 per page.

Page transfer size also ranges, starting from 590kb and rising up to 2.8MB for a single page. These variations show the extent of difference within the DIY sector, but also the vast impact this is likely to have on businesses when website speed and performance don’t reflect their storefronts.

Poor pagespeed impacts users, resulting in lower sales. It also reflects negatively on the brand, as customers are less likely to return to a slow-loading website. We know from numerous studies that slower pages result in a far higher bounce rate. If the products you sell can be sourced faster from a competitor, keeping users on site should be a top priority.

In this instance, Travis Perkins, Homebase and B&Q are all at risk. They may have large physical footprints (B&Q currently has 288 stores) but as more and more of us shop online, slower page performance could affect their market share.

With issues like these, it’s easy to see why pagespeed performance is varied across the sector. It’s a shame to see companies selling similar products online without comparable SEO strategies. As Google is now including pagespeed data into its search rankings, a slower site will rank lower than a faster performing one. Market leaders risk being outperformed by smaller competitors over a technicality.

Want to find out more about website speed across the UK eCommerce sector and the steps you can take to dramatically improve your page load times? Check out our Pagespeed Leaderboard and download our e-book.

References:
https://www.insider.co.uk/news/diy-market-seeing-boost-during-21994040
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107061/diy-online-sales-growth-during-coronavirus-in-the-uk/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53094129
https://www.insider.co.uk/news/diy-market-seeing-boost-during-21994040
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/30/bq-homebase-and-pret-reopen-more-stores-with-safety-measures
https://www.retaileconomics.co.uk/top-10-retailers-diy-and-gardening