October 14, 2026 – HigherHost, a managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting provider, today announced the launch of a free speed test for online store owners. The tool, available at the WooCommerce speed test page on the company’s website, scans a WooCommerce store and estimates how much revenue the store may be losing to slow mobile page loads. HigherHost developed the tool because many small store owners know their site feels slow but cannot tell what is causing it or what it costs them.
The test runs on Google’s PageSpeed Insights data. It measures mobile performance on the pages that matter most to a store, including the home page and the checkout, and reports metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Cumulative Layout Shift and server response time. It also identifies the hosting provider behind the site and lists the issues it finds in order of priority, each with a short explanation written for people who are not developers. An optional report can be sent by email.
The tool also includes a revenue calculator. Store owners enter their monthly visitors, conversion rate, average order value and the share of orders that come from mobile devices. The calculator then estimates the revenue that could be recovered if pages loaded faster. The estimate is based on a figure published by Google in 2019, which reported that a one-second delay in mobile load time can affect retail conversion rates by up to 20 percent. Google’s article cites 2017 research by SOASTA. Because that figure is an upper bound, HigherHost caps the loss the tool can calculate at 25 percent and applies it to mobile orders only. Every result is labelled as an estimate.
Independent research points in the same direction. A 2022 analysis by Portent, covering conversion data from 20 websites including six e-commerce sites, found average e-commerce conversion rates of 3.05 percent at a one-second load time and 0.67 percent at four seconds. The same analysis found that a site loading in one second had an e-commerce conversion rate about 2.5 times that of a site loading in five seconds. Results vary by business, and the figures the tool produces are estimates, not a guarantee of outcomes.
“Store owners often tell us that their site feels slow, but they have no number to put on it,” said Tom van der Weele, founder of HigherHost. “The test shows what is slowing a store down, how it compares with Google’s thresholds, and what that may cost in lost orders. We have been careful to label every figure as an estimate and to show where it comes from.”
The test is free to use and can be run against any public WooCommerce site.
About HigherHost
HigherHost provides managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting for small businesses in the United States. The company handles server setup, caching, security and migrations, so that store owners can focus on running their business instead of maintaining infrastructure. HigherHost’s founder has hosted websites for more than two decades and works with WooCommerce stores that are moving from budget shared hosting plans.
