How Fast and Effective Cloud Hosting Improves eCommerce Conversion Rates

High-performance IT infrastructure can be a powerful tool in improving your conversion rate. In this insight, we explore how scalability, uptime, and optimised performance can keep visitors on your site, and improve your bottom line.?

Scaling to meet demand: Handling traffic spikes

As an eCommerce business, higher traffic is good news. However if it is not handled correctly, it can actually lead to decreased conversion rates. Traffic spikes require increased resources, or site visitors will experience slow loading times, and even downtime, meaning they will be less likely to make a purchase.?

Our customer Remarkable Commerce, a creator of eCommerce platforms for online retailers, experienced heavy, unpredictable traffic on Black Friday via their customers’ websites, which they struggled to handle with their previous infrastructure. Their customer’s sites would experience downtime due to a lack of available resources, leading to losses of up to 10,000 orders a day for one site.?

After migrating to our Private Cloud solution, they were able to dynamically scale their resources up and down as needed to meet traffic demand. The first Black Friday after the migration saw a 43% increase in users compared to the previous year, but despite this, Remarkable were able to handle the traffic, leading to an 89% increase in successful transactions. Find out more details in our Remarkable Commerce case study.?

For eCommerce businesses, scalability is therefore an essential requirement when choosing a cloud hosting solution. You should consult with your provider to ensure they understand your web traffic, including future predictions, and any potential variability, and can scale your infrastructure accordingly.?

But just having the capacity for scaling isn’t enough – if your resources aren’t scaled up quickly enough to respond to traffic, you will still end up with the same issue. Similarly, if the resources aren’t quickly scaled back down after the traffic spike, you will be left paying for unneeded resources. You should seek a provider who can dynamically scale your platform up and down in a timely manner, to ensure your conversions, and profits, are maximised.?

Visitor retention: Maintaining uptime

Keeping visitors on your site is vital in improving conversion rates, giving a higher likelihood of converting new visitors into customers, and encouraging repeat customers. Poorly performing sites with slow loading times and downtime will frustrate page visitors, making them more likely to leave your site.

In a survey of UK consumers, our research found that a third of respondents would move to a competitor’s website after less than 30 seconds of downtime if their go-to brand suffered an outage. This statistic demonstrates that the importance of uptime cannot be overstated, overriding existing brand loyalties.?

Reliable IT infrastructure with high availability is the key to avoiding downtime, and keeping visitors on your site, leading to higher conversion rates.?

Cloud hosting providers should communicate their uptime SLAs, indicating the performance you can expect. For eCommerce businesses, you should seek a high availability platform with guaranteed consistent uptime.?

Your next line of defence against downtime is disaster recovery (DR). While many causes of downtime, such as the previously mentioned traffic spikes, can be prevented, there are many reasons a site can go down. This could include natural disasters or extreme weather impacting infrastructure, and the increasing risk of cyberattacks.?

A thorough disaster recovery strategy, with a high-performance back-up site means that, in the case of an unexpected disaster, your site can be recovered with minimal time offline, mitigating any impact on your conversion rates.?

Improve page speeds: Optimise server performance?

The amount of eCommerce sites online is constantly increasing, and, with this increase in choice, consumers will not stick around on a site with slow page speeds. A study from 2017 showed that even a 100-millisecond delay in website load time could hurt conversion rates by 7%, and a 2-second delay increased bounce rates by 103%. At the time this study was conducted, there were approximately 10 million eCommerce sites globally. In 2024 this had increased to 30.7 million, meaning it is likely the impact on your conversion rates will be even greater today.?

It is therefore clear that, to maximise your conversion rates, you should ensure maximum page speeds for your eCommerce site. There are many factors which affect page load times, including site content, code efficiency, and image optimisations, which should all be considered, but one way to quickly and effectively see an improvement is to upgrade your hosting.

The server infrastructure and bandwidth available for your platform can affect your page speeds. The faster and more powerful the servers on which your data is hosted, the quicker your site can load. Similarly, higher bandwidth means faster loading speeds, particularly for content-heavy sites. High-performance hosting, with high bandwidth availability, will therefore improve your page load speed, leading to more conversions for your eCommerce site.

Page load speeds can also be improved by reducing latency – the time taken for data to travel from the server to the user’s device. Lower latency means faster response and loading times, and a better user experience. Latency is affected by the physical distance between the server and the end user. Partnering with a global hosting provider means you can operate from a server in a data centre hosted near your user base, or from servers in multiple locations through a content delivery network. This reduces the latency, improving the page load speeds and your conversion rates.?

How our cloud hosting solutions can support your eCommerce business

Our hosting solutions for eCommerce businesses are designed with your success in mind.?

There are several benefits of our solutions for your customer satisfaction and conversion rates. We offer unlimited scalability, allowing you to adjust resources such as storage, RAM, and CPU, and spin up and decommission VMs as needed to meet traffic demands. With 100% network uptime and 99.999% cloud server uptime SLAs as standard, we ensure your site remains online and accessible for your customers. To ensure optimised performance and loading speeds, we build our infrastructure on industry-leading hardware and software, maintained and updated by our team of expert engineers.?

If you are looking to improve your conversion rates, find out more about our eCommerce hosting solutions, or contact our cloud experts for an initial conversation.?

Originally published at: https://www.hyve.com/insights/how-fast-and-effective-cloud-hosting-improves-ecommerce-conversion-rates/