HigherHost, a managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting provider, has released a free speed test that helps WooCommerce store owners see how slow mobile loading may be affecting their sales. The test is available at https://higherhost.com/woocommerce-speed-test/ and can be used on any public WooCommerce site.

The tool scans a store's most important pages, including the home page and checkout, using Google PageSpeed Insights data. It reports Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Cumulative Layout Shift and server response time, names the hosting provider behind the site, and lists the problems it finds in order of priority with a plain-language explanation of each. Owners can have a report sent to them by email.

A calculator then turns the scan into a revenue estimate. Owners enter monthly visitors, conversion rate, average order value and the share of orders that come from mobile devices. The estimate follows a 2019 Google article, https://business.google.com/uk/think/marketing-strategies/mobile-site-speed-importance/, which cites 2017 SOASTA research. It reports that a one-second delay in mobile loading can reduce retail conversion by up to 20 percent. Because that is an upper limit, HigherHost caps the calculated loss at 25 percent, applies it to mobile orders only, and labels every result as an estimate.

A 2022 Portent analysis of 20 websites, six of them e-commerce, found an average e-commerce conversion rate of 3.05 percent at a one-second load time and 0.67 percent at four seconds. Sites loading in one second converted about 2.5 times better than sites loading in five. Results differ by business, and the tool's figures are estimates, not guarantees.

"A slow store can lose orders without the owner ever seeing it in their reports," said Tom van der Weele, founder of HigherHost. "That is why we built the test."