Didrik Steen Hegna

In the speed-obsessed world of today, better performance translates directly into business gains. You only have about eight seconds (source link) – that’s the average human attention span – before users lose concentration. From that stat alone, it’s obvious why website performance matters. No?

Google found that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load (source link).

And nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed influences their likelihood to buy (source link).

Faster sites see more engagement and higher conversion rates – for example, Walmart observed up to a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of improvement in page load time (source link).

Performance also plays a crucial role in retaining users (fewer will bounce) and ensuring a pleasant user experience, which boosts customer loyalty. It even affects your search engine ranking (Google uses page speed/Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal) and impacts your Google Ads Quality Score (slow landing pages can raise ad costs). In short, web performance influences:

• Time on site (users stay longer on fast sites)
• Page views (users view more pages when each loads quickly)
• Bounce rate (slow pages cause users to leave)
• Conversions / Revenue (speed encourages purchases – milliseconds can be millions)
• User satisfaction and retention
• Organic search traffic (page experience is an SEO factor)
• Bandwidth/CDN costs (efficient sites use less data)
• Ad Quality Score (fast landing pages improve ad performance)

Having all these benefits in mind, it pays off to have a performant website, right? So, how do you achieve that?

If you do a search for keywords page load time and site speed, you’ll get a mix of tools and short, half-baked explanations pages. Even though slow websites are a major turn-off for users, nobody wanted to sink their teeth a bit deeper into the topic? Kind of like obvious as to why…because speed matters, right?

Right. If a site takes too long to load, more than half will just leave. This especially hurts online stores, where slow speeds mean lost customers. Basically, if you want happy customers and good sales, your website needs to be fast.

This guide will help you go beyond just the speed matters statement and understand how to make that happen, whether you're technical or not.

Sure enough, staying true to your brand’s identity matters, but it matters just as much as creating a seamless, engaging shopping experience that easily guides visitors from the homepage to checkout. It matters just as much as your website performance or having an omnichannel strategy in place.

Given that the design of your eCommerce store depends greatly on your product, product industry standards, and audience expectations, crafting a one-size-fits-all web design guide is not really feasible.

So, instead of creating a universal blueprint for eCommerce web design, here we’ll focus on articulating a set of best practices we see successful online stores (our clients) implement, be it for the sake of UX or SEO or they are simply cool to have 🙂

Authentication, authorization, and access control to a cloud service is an important topic, especially when rolling out in larger enterprises. When we decided to level up the roles and permissions in Crystallize, we wanted to think differently.

How can we make a role-based permission system that is easy to understand and efficient to use?

A great content model is the best starting point when starting a new webshop, App, or marketing website. The content model serves as documentation and overview and connects information architects, designers, developers, and business stakeholders. We have created a design system in Figma for content modeling.

When using illustrations, infographics, or diagrams you would often like to use a simplified version for mobile devices vs a full desktop display. Using the picture tag and a simple media query you can easily do this in good old HTML. No JavaScript or CSS trickery is needed. The same technique can also be used to serve responsive images that are optimized for site speed.