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Loyalty widgets are an awesome way to solidify your existing customer base. However, adding loyalty widgets to your website will impact its performance, as the browser needs to download and run the code to display the widget.
We test Stamped.io, Smile, Loyalty Lion, Yotpo Rewards & Influence.io. We used a blank shopify site and swag.reviews.io.
To ensure a fair comparison between the widgets, the following control measures were put into place:
Tool used for collecting data included:
There are a couple of important metrics these tests will provide:
These metrics are also used by Google to affect rankings in search results. Google suggests the following speeds within Lighthouse:
Below we take a look at the overall results for all the tests carried out. The data collected was from the live Shopify store (https://swag.reviews.io) using GTMetrix, with the network located in Vancouver, Canada.
Firstly we have a comparison of the specific metrics recorded through GTMetrix:
We then have the overall performance indicator. As you can see, some widgets do a great job of not affecting the performance of the widgetless page. Yotpo Rewards default widget had a negative effect on the performance.
Here is the time it takes for the widget to load, as well as for the page to be fully loaded for each widget.
Here is the size of each widget in kilobytes, with the smaller size being better.
Page Fully Loaded Time (FLT) : 1st Run 5.2s, Second Run 4.5s, Third Run 4.7s
To get a baseline, here are the results without using any loyalty widgets:
Page Fully Loaded Time (FLT) : 1st Run 4.7, Second Run 4.8, Third Run 4.7s
Page Fully Loaded Time (FLT) : 1st Run 5.1s, Second Run 4.9s, Third Run 4.9s
Page Fully Loaded Time (FLT) : 1st Run 5.9s, Second Run 5.0s, Third Run 5.0s
Page Fully Loaded Time (FLT) : 1st Run 4.7s, Second Run 4.7s, Third Run 4.5s
Page Fully Loaded Time (FLT) : 1st Run 4.7s, Second Run 4.7s, Third Run 4.8s
It is worth mentioning that Stamped.io uses a method of only loading data once interacting with the widget, saving significant size in this case.
The most important indicators here are the fully loaded time (FLT) and widget load time, as both of these indicate the impact on the webpage and the time till the widget is visible respectively. This data was averaged over three tests for each widget, however take these figures with a grain of salt as network speed can vary throughout the tests.
The data indicates that Smile, Influence.io and Stamped.io are well optimised and have the lowest impact on site performance in terms of load time. LoyaltyLion also performed very well in low content environments. Yotpo Rewards seemed to have biggest impact on performance due to widget load time and widget size.
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In summary, it is key to consider performance when choosing a loyalty widget, as a slow website can increase bounce rate and provide a negative experience to your customers. Speed is also a key factor in Google ranking algorithm.
We used standard default widgets in the test. Sites may different results by configuring the widgets.
