An eCommerce site’s speed is critical to its performance. Your customers’ experience with your service and product will be enhanced 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 to be 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 can you improve the speed of your website which in return would help you grow your company:

1. Examine the cause of slow performance:

The amount of text, CSS and JS files, and photos on various types of pages varies. As a result, the weight of each page varies slightly, requiring varying amounts of time to completely load each page. It’s almost impossible to go through every page of an online shop. 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 they should always work flawlessly.

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

Several free Google tools can be used 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 as well as 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 on how to improve 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 problems were discovered, 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 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 reason for this is that the smaller the page size, the better. The size of a page can be easily determined 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, try to keep page load times to 3 seconds or less. In that case, find the best balance between the shoppers you are going to lose because of load time versus the shoppers you are going to 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:

Using 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, you should think about using a CDN. It stores content on servers located across the world, which speeds 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. It also boosts search engine rankings as a result of performance metrics optimization. A CDN link, in general, aims to improve overall website speed and make long-term website maintenance easier.

4. Compress data:

Compressing data will significantly improve the efficiency of a website. Reduce the size of data sent to a browser using some compression program. Until returning data in response to a client request, the server compresses the data. This necessitates the modification of server configuration files, which necessitates developer skills. You must ensure that none of your users are using outdated browsers. Once you’re certain, turn on data compression. Older browsers such as Internet Explorer 4, are not compatible.

5. Specify dimension of image:

To speed up your e-commerce website, you should set the image’s height and width so that the browser can create placeholders for the images and load the page and images at the same time. 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 the image’s size, allowing it to make space for it when other sections of the page load. Along with this, it automatically adjusts image sizes for various types of computers, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

6. 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 it’s critical to choose conversion optimization tools that include a comprehensive set of features in a single platform, rather than relying on multiple external scripts.

7. Keep clean code:

Depending on how well a program is coded, it can run faster or slower. A website is made up of code, making it a type of computer program.  A 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.

8. Monitor website’s efficiency:

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. 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 all have an impact on results. That is why you should keep track of performance metrics at all times.

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

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 at that, is having a website that is 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 methods outlined above.

We hope that this article assists you in increasing the pace of your eCommerce website. In case you have any other doubts, feel free to reach out to us.