Checkout speed: how slow payment steps lose orders

Key takeaways

Checkout speed matters more than speed anywhere else in a shop, because every visitor it loses had already chosen to buy. Payment steps stall for specific reasons: delivery rates fetched live, address lookups, payment scripts and bank verification. A shopper who presses Pay and sees nothing fears a failed or doubled charge. Fix the pauses, and show progress where you cannot.

• 70% of online shopping baskets are abandoned on average (Baymard Institute).
• 9.2% higher retail order value followed a 0.1 second mobile speed gain (Deloitte, 2020).
• The riskiest pause is after Pay: silence there reads as failure.
• Remove marketing scripts from checkout pages before anything else.

Why does checkout speed matter so much?

Checkout speed matters because the visitor's intent is at its highest and their tolerance for doubt is at its lowest. They are handing over card details. Any stall raises a question about whether the shop is reliable.

Baymard Institute's long-running average puts basket abandonment at about 70%. Most of that has other causes, such as extra costs and forced account creation, but a slow or confusing process is among the reasons shoppers give. Deloitte's 2020 study found retail shoppers spent 9.2% more when mobile speed improved by 0.1 seconds.

• How website speed affects customer experience and conversions
• Checkout abandonment: fix the last step of the sale

Where do checkouts usually stall?

Checkouts stall at the points where the page has to ask another system for something. Each one is a pause the shopper can feel.

• Basket updates: changing quantity reloads the whole page.
• Delivery options: rates fetched live from a courier.
• Address lookup: a postcode search that hangs.
• Discount codes: applied with a full page refresh.
• Payment: card fields loaded from the payment provider.
• Bank verification: the extra authentication step from the card issuer.

• Website slow to respond to taps and clicks? Causes and fixes

How do you speed up a checkout?

Strip the checkout to what it needs to take payment, then make each remaining wait visible. Checkout pages should be the lightest on the site, not the heaviest.

• 1. Remove chat, pop-ups, review widgets and non-essential tags from checkout.
• 2. Update basket totals in place, without a full reload.
• 3. Offer digital wallets so returning shoppers skip typing.
• 4. Use browser autofill correctly on every field.
• 5. Show a clear 'processing payment' state the moment Pay is pressed.
• 6. Disable the Pay button after the first tap.

• Apple Pay and Google Pay on your website: worth adding?
• Mobile checkout design: fewer taps, more orders
• Third-party scripts: the hidden reason your site is slow

What can you not control?

Some of the wait belongs to other parties. The payment provider's card fields load from their servers. The bank's verification step runs on the bank's systems. On hosted platforms such as Shopify, the checkout itself is largely fixed.

What you control is everything around those steps: how much else the page loads, whether the shopper is told what is happening, and whether the confirmation page appears promptly afterwards. Do not remove fraud checks or tracking you rely on for the sake of a faster score.

• Shopify store speed: what you can and cannot fix

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in small online shops: the product pages have been tuned, and the checkout carries every script the site has ever added, including a chat widget, a newsletter pop-up and four advertising pixels. On a phone, the card fields appear several seconds after the rest of the page.

Removing everything from checkout that does not help take payment is often the cheapest speed fix a shop can make, and it protects the visitors closest to buying. Global Bridge Labs (GBL) audits checkout scripts first in any shop review.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses

Checkout speed checklist

• Place a test order on a phone over mobile data.
• Time each step: basket, delivery, payment, confirmation.
• List every third-party script on checkout pages.
• Remove those that do not help take payment.
• Add visible progress after Pay is pressed.
• Test with a discount code and a changed quantity.

• E-commerce website speed: where online shops lose orders

Next step

A test order on a phone will tell you more about your checkout than any report. We will place one with you and mark every pause.