Retailers Are Leaving Billions on the Table Because of Slow Sites. Here’s How Small Brands Win.

If you needed a fresh reminder that website performance is revenue, a new 2025 benchmark study from Catchpoint delivers it in neon: even the world’s biggest retailers are bleeding sales because their sites are slow, unstable, or inconsistent across regions. The punchline? Speed isn’t a vanity metric—it’s the difference between a cart that converts and one that quietly disappears.

What stood out most is that size doesn’t buy you speed. Some of the highest-revenue brands underperformed on user experience. Household names like Walmart and Costco posted middling experience scores, and Seven & i lagged even further. Meanwhile, leaner players took the crown: Aldi notched a perfect experience score, Action was right behind, and Ikea punched above its weight relative to far larger competitors.

There’s a bigger lesson here for small and mid-market retailers: you don’t need a Fortune 50 budget to deliver a Fortune-level experience. In fact, agility and focus often beat scale when it comes to shaving seconds, stabilizing layouts, and delighting shoppers on the “last mile” of the internet.

Availability isn’t experience

The report also found that uptime is nearly universal—more than nine in ten retailers stayed online. But being “up” isn’t the same as being fast or smooth. Over a quarter of retailers still posted lower experience scores, dragged down by issues like layout shift, sluggish initial rendering, or performance that changes dramatically by region or device.

That gap between availability and experience is where money evaporates. Dashboards may look green, but your shoppers don’t browse averages—they feel the slowest path. Ten seconds on mobile in Tokyo or São Paulo is a bounce, not a browser tab patiently waiting.

Why the giants stumble (and why they still win)

It’s tempting to assume big brands are flawless. In reality, they wrestle with complex tech stacks: legacy platforms, acres of third-party scripts, personalization layers, heavy analytics, and global content footprints. All of that creates latency, instability, and maintenance drag.

And yet, they keep selling—because they have moats: brand trust, pricing leverage, distribution, loyalty programs, and omnichannel convenience. Those advantages can mask user-experience friction… for a while.

Small businesses don’t have those moats—but that’s exactly why speed, clarity, and consistency are your superpowers. When you’re fast, stable, and delightful on mobile, you remove the last reason a shopper might default to a juggernaut “just because.”

What “performance” actually means in 2025

It’s more than a single score. Here’s what moves the needle:

• Core Web Vitals: Especially LCP (how fast the main content appears), CLS (how stable the layout feels), and INP (how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks).
• Time to First Byte (TTFB) and first render: Server speed and early paint are your first impression.
• Mobile and regional parity: A site that’s snappy in New York but sluggish in São Paulo is still losing money.
• Third-party governance: Ads, trackers, chat, and A/B testing tools often cause the worst slowdowns.
• Reliability under load: Peak season traffic should not turn into a performance tax.

Quick wins that compound

If you run ecommerce, here are high-leverage fixes that typically pay off within days or weeks:

• Optimize images at scale: Next-gen formats (AVIF/WebP), responsive sizes, lazy loading below the fold.
• Tame the JavaScript: Defer non-critical scripts, remove unused code, self-host critical third-party assets where allowed, and prioritize interaction.
• Stabilize layouts: Reserve space for images/ads, load fonts responsibly to prevent content jumps, and avoid injected elements pushing content down.
• Use a modern CDN: Edge caching, smart routing, and regional POPs to reduce latency around the world.
• Preload what matters: Fonts, hero images, and key CSS so your first render is fast and consistent.
• Reduce server wait time: Tune hosting, enable compression, implement caching headers, and consider edge functions for dynamic content.
• Guard the checkout: Strip third-party scripts and heavy experiments from your cart and checkout flow; speed there is ROI rocket fuel.

How Hogan Media Group helps small retailers outrun the big guys

We help brands turn performance into profit. Our approach combines technical rigor with revenue-centric prioritization—so every millisecond you save shows up in conversions, AOV, and repeat purchase.

1) Performance & CRO Audit (2–3 weeks of impact, not months of meetings)

• Real-user monitoring (RUM) to see what customers actually experience across devices, browsers, and regions
• Synthetic testing and waterfall analysis to identify render blockers and noisy third-party scripts
• Core Web Vitals deep dive with specific, prioritized fixes tied to revenue risk
• Checkout friction review: from PDP to payment, we target the slowest steps first

2) Engineering sprints for speed

• Image pipeline overhaul (automated resizing, modern formats, CDN rules)
• JavaScript diet: defer, split, or remove heavy bundles; reduce INP pain points
• CSS critical path and font loading optimization to eliminate layout shift
• Edge/CDN configuration: caching, geo-routing, stale-while-revalidate, and smart prefetching
• Third-party governance: tag audits, loading strategies, and SLAs for external vendors

3) International performance parity

• Regional testing (e.g., US/EU/LatAm/APAC) and targeted fixes for the slowest geos
• DNS and routing improvements to cut TTFB outside your home market
• Content localization strategy that doesn’t balloon payloads

4) Measure what matters

• Custom dashboards that translate milliseconds into money: conversion, bounce, and revenue per session
• Controlled experiments to prove the lift from each change
• Ongoing monitoring and alerts so regressions never surprise you during peak season

5) Integrated growth, not just speed
Performance is one pillar of a growth system. We pair it with:

• Conversion-first UX tweaks, high-impact A/B testing, and session replay insights
• SEO hygiene and page experience improvements that compound organic traffic
• Paid media that lands visitors on fast, high-intent pages—so your CAC doesn’t get taxed by a slow site
• Content strategy that keeps pages lightweight without sacrificing persuasion

What good looks like (and how it pays)

After a typical two-sprint engagement, most clients see:

• 20–50% faster LCP on key templates (home, category, PDP, cart)
• 10–30% improvement in INP on mobile (fewer “tap and wait” moments)
• Meaningful lifts in conversion rate on mobile traffic (where the pain is greatest)
• Lower bounce and higher engagement, especially from paid traffic and new visitors

Your mileage will vary, but the direction is consistent: when you remove friction, more people buy.

The takeaway

The Catchpoint study underscores a simple truth: the market now rewards execution over size. Big retailers can afford to be imperfect because of their moats; small retailers can’t. The good news is that performance is one of the few levers where smaller teams can move faster and win.

If your dashboards say “all good” but your customers feel otherwise—especially on mobile, on slower networks, or outside your home region—it’s time to look beyond uptime and averages. Measure what shoppers actually experience, fix what slows them down, and guard your checkout like it’s your storefront door.

Want a second pair of eyes on your speed and conversion? Hogan Media Group can audit your site, prioritize the fixes that make you money, and partner with your team to ship them fast. Let’s turn every millisecond into measurable revenue.