Over the Cyber 5 weekend, cosmetic and haircare brand MyKitsch.com received hundreds of thousands of page views to its ecommerce site.

Luckily, its ecommerce site was able to handle the increase in traffic, and still maintain a median response time of 1 second or faster and a bump in conversion rate to boot, says Kitsch’s chief operating officer Jeremy Thurswell.

“The weekend was incredible. Record number of sales, and really high conversion,” Thurswell says.

On Black Friday, MyKitsch.com’s conversion rate reached 8.15% and Cyber Monday was 7.38%, he says. This is much higher than the 6.4% average conversion rate for the seven-day period Nov. 23-30, he says.

He attributes the high conversion to MyKitchs.com’s fast site speed, in which its site can reach “first contentful paint” or enough of a website’s content is loaded that shopper can interact with it, in less than one second. This is especially important on mobile, which accounts for 80-90% of the brand’s traffic and sales, he says. A portion of those mobile shoppers are not using Wi-Fi but are using mobile data, so a fast site is important, Thurswell says.

“We certainly want them to buy a product. If a shopper is clicking through from an ad they see or an email, people’s attention spans are really, really short,” Thurswell says. “We want to have as little [lag time] in the checkout process as possible, and making sure it’s a very snappy, fast site.”

A fast site is important to the site experience and retailers are mostly meeting this need, according to a September Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights survey of 1,000 online shoppers. 73% of consumers said online retailers had met or exceeded expectations for a fast/easy checkout process, although only 42% said retailers had met/exceeded their expectations for a fast loading site. Plus, 30% said slow loading times were a frustration they had on an ecommerce site between March-August 2021.

MyKitsch.com has a speedy site thanks to performance plugin Edgemesh, Thurswell says. Edgemesh makes websites run faster by pre-caching the site’s web pages within the shopper’s browser, says Edgemesh CEO Jake Loveless. Edgemesh uses a global network of servers in 280 cities to run its technology. Using the shoppers’ IP addresses, it knows the geographic location from where the shopper is visiting the site and can run its technology from a server closer to the shopper. Just from the physical closeness of the server and the shopper, the site will run faster, Loveless says. For MyKitsch.com, Thurswell knows that the pre-caching of a lot of the images has helped speed up the site.

Speed isn’t the only factor when it comes to conversion, but it is a main one, Thurswell says. Prior to using Edgemesh, MyKitsch.com’s average conversion rate average was around 5.5%. Since it switched in September 2020, its site now holds steady in the low 7% range for conversion, he says.

“People would leave the site if it took too long to load or add to cart. We’ve seen that and there are a lot of articles and data backing that up,” he says.

Because Kitsch is not a household brand, it knows that having a fast site will help give shoppers confidence it is a legitimate brand, Thurswell says.

“A faster site promotes trust,” he says. “If you have a really slow, buggy and laggy site, shoppers might think, ‘what is this brand? Maybe its’s a scam or something.’”