How To Speed Up Your Ecommerce Website

An eCommerce site’s speed is critical to its performance. It will enhance your customer’s experience with your service and product if your website is fast. According to reliable e-commerce research and case studies, the recommended site load speed is no more than 3 seconds. In practice, the longer it takes for a website to load, the lower the conversion rate, bounce rate, user session duration, and other KPIs become. Not only does speed boost the customer experience, but it also has a direct effect on conversions and sales. Simply put, slow websites result in lower sales.

Apart from user experience and revenue, the pace of your eCommerce site affects your SEO rankings. Google and other search engines consider pace a significant measure of user experience and ranking factor. A quicker eCommerce website can assist you in attracting more free search engine traffic.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can improve the speed of your website, which in return would help you grow your company:

1. Examine the cause of slow performance:

It’s almost impossible to go through every page of an online shop. The amount of text, CSS and JS files, and photos on various pages varies. As a result, the weight of each page varies slightly, requiring varying amounts of time to load each page completely. As a result, you can examine the homepage, category page, and product page separately to conduct a thorough performance review. These are the most popular consumer entry points and should always work flawlessly.

Let’s look at how to identify bottlenecks in your e-commerce website’s results:

Can use several free Google tools to determine how quickly the website pages load on both desktop and mobile devices. They analyze the website’s vital performance metrics and compare them to the Chrome User Experience Report. As a result, you can see the average page load speed and the score in points ranging from 1 to 100, with 100 being the desired result.

Lower results indicate that your website needs work. Some tools provide detailed suggestions for improving the observed issues in this situation. The tool’s developer guide contains a wealth of knowledge about the service.

Analyzing tools organize and offer information in a simple and structured manner, including links to the locations where discovered problems, detailed guidance about how to resolve them, and many other features. Users can manually adjust the location of virtual hosting after registering to see how quickly a website loads from various parts of the world. Furthermore, their functionality allows registered users to save a check history and review output changes later.

2. Limit the size of the page:

It goes without saying that the heavier the pages are, the longer they will take to load. The size of a page is expressed in kilobytes. The number of HTML and CSS files, images, scripts, and other media on a page determines its size. Avoid embedding large objects or photographs. Consider loading times when creating your pages. The because smaller the page size, the better. Can easily determine the size of a page by saving it to your computer as a web archive folder from your browser. Then determine the folder’s height. If your e-commerce site needs richer graphics to generate sales, keep page load times to 3 seconds or less. In that case, find the best balance between the shoppers you will lose because of load time versus those you will gain because of richer graphics.

Here are a few pointers on how to keep your page size to a bare minimum:

• Examine all of your website’s tools and delete any scripts, plugins, or fonts that are no longer in use.
• JS and CSS files should be merged and minified. While code minification helps to reduce the number of server requests, which speeds up page load time, merging helps to reduce the number of server requests.
• Remove unnecessary images, compress them, convert them to WebP, replace existing images with SVG images, create sprites of tiny images and icons, and so on.
• Since images make up such a large portion of web pages, figuring out the simplest ways to use them will significantly increase site speed while keeping the platform user-friendly.

3. Use CDN:

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is another common way to improve website efficiency. These networks are made up of several servers spread across the globe. If you have clients from all over the world, consider using a CDN. It stores content on servers worldwide, speeding up loading times. Your website files will be copied and stored on these servers until you allow a CDN. When users from various continents (or even countries) visit your online store, all data is loaded from the server that is nearest to them, enabling the website to load much faster.

CDNs are ideal for all types of websites, but they are particularly well suited to e-commerce sites with high traffic volumes. A CDN link, in general, aims to improve overall website speed and make long-term website maintenance easier. It also boosts search engine rankings as a result of performance metrics optimization.

4. Compress data:

Compressing data will significantly improve the efficiency of a website. Data compression can minimize the amount of data sent to a browser. This process involves compressing the data on the server before it is sent in response to a client request. However, this method requires modifying server configuration files, which requires developer expertise. Before enabling data compression, it is important to ensure that none of your users are utilizing outdated browsers. This is because older browsers like Internet Explorer 4 may not be compatible with this feature.

5. Specify the dimension of the image:

To speed up your e-commerce website, you should set the image’s height and width so the browser can create placeholders for the images and load the page and images simultaneously. Retailers sometimes construct images without defining the image’s dimensions on the page. This allows the browser to finish loading the image before moving on to the next task, which takes longer. Simple height and width attributes for each image inform the browser of its size, allowing it to make space for it when other sections of the page load. It automatically adjusts image sizes for various types of computers, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

6. Keep clean code:

A website is made up of code, making it a computer program. Depending on how well a program is coded, it can run faster or slower. Software with clean code runs much faster and uses far fewer server resources. Slow programs are caused by verbose, repetitive code that isn’t required and code that isn’t well configured.

Quality web developers with a lot of experience are known for writing clean code. For any serious eCommerce website, this necessitates a specialist developer.

7. Use better conversion rate optimization tools:

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is critical for rising sales on an eCommerce website. A traditional online store has many interactive elements to increase conversions, such as a free shipping bar on the homepage, a black Friday sale countdown timer in the website header, an exit-intent popup on checkout pages, and even gamification on the mobile site to minimize abandonment. To add these complex components, store owners and retailers often use a mix of resources and plugins. The problem is that they aren’t all properly tailored for speed. This is why choosing conversion optimization tools that include a comprehensive set of features in a single platform is critical, rather than relying on multiple external scripts.

8. Monitor the website’s efficiency:

Adding new items to the marketplace, making significant improvements to the platform’s custom features, or even making minor changes to the website design can impact results. That is why you should keep track of performance metrics at all times. If you finish the performance enhancement and your current website load time is satisfactory, it does not mean you will never have to deal with this problem again.

This allows you to respond quickly and resolve even the tiniest problem until it causes damage to your website.

Wrap up:

Ecommerce is a fiercely competitive industry, forcing businesses to seek out whatever advantage they can to gain a foothold. One such advantage, and a strong one, is having a website optimized for speed. By offering a seamless shopping experience, a fast website can turn visitors into customers with greater performance. Take your eCommerce service to the next level by optimizing your website using the above methods.

We hope that this article assists you in increasing the pace of your eCommerce website. If you have any other doubts, do not hesitate to contact our Shopify experts to fulfill all your business requirements.