The slower a website’s load time will be, the higher is the chance of abandonment. Most customers wait up to three seconds for a page to load. Forty-seven percent of customers expect a given Ecommerce website to load in less than three seconds. So, if your Ecommerce store fails to do so, it is likely to be abandoned by most site visitors. In other words, you will end up losing potential customers.
No Ecommerce store would want this to happen. Hence, optimizing site speed should be your priority along with developing a user-friendly and value-adding website. Here are ideas that can you can use to optimize the speed of your Ecommerce website.
- Reduce the size of the page
The bigger the size of a given page, the longer time it will take for it to load. The size of a website page is measured in kilobytes, and your target should reduce the number of kilobytes per page. This size is dependent on various elements. This includes JavaScript, images, and CSS.
To reduce the size of the page, it is highly advised that you avoid embedding too many HD images on it. The same goes for big objects that you can do without. While such items might make your website look better, you must know how to balance aesthetics with user-friendliness.
Aim for a load time of three seconds and reduce your page size enough to reach this objective. If having rich graphics on your Ecommerce site is a requirement, make sure you find the right balance. Agree on a speed that allows you to gain more customers due to rich graphics compared to losing customers due to a slow site.
- Use a CDN service
Content Delivery Network comes in very handy when trying to improve the performance of a website. Using a CDN service allows your site’s content to operate on various servers at the same time. Hence, distributing and relaying your site content to your end user becomes an easy task, whereby the content is received by the user via the nearest server. This aspect of a CDN service helps in improving the speed of your website.
Not only does CDN aid in boosting page load time, but it also reduces the chances of it crashing due to low bandwidth. To realize the benefits associated with CDN, make sure you opt for a web hosting company that delivers CDN as part of its services. Or, you can always get a third-party to configure CDN system to your web hosting platform.
- Compromise on JPEG when possible
We understand that in an Ecommerce site, images are critical. After all, unlike brick and mortar store, customers don’t have the choice of looking at the product first hand. Instead, they have to rely on pictures to gauge the product’s attractiveness.
In such a case, high-quality images might be sought. Most companies tend to go for PNG images. While these are of excellent quality, they also significantly increase the page loading time. Compared to this JPEG files tend to load faster than PNG files. If you think that the extra loading time of the PNG file won’t lead to customer abandonment, then you can go ahead and include it in your website. However, do make use of TinyPNG to sort and compress large files.
However, if you are losing out on promising conversion rates because of low page speed, it is time to include JPEG files instead. Add a riveting product description instead.
- Reduce redirects
When an Ecommerce website keeps on redirecting you to new pages, it is bound to get annoying. After all, every time you are redirected to a page, you have to wait for it to load. This is because HTTP request-response cycle needs to be completed before a redirected page is opened. Let’s not even talk about how long the process gets if there is a redirect chain that redirects one page to another and so forth.
Reduce the number of redirects on your Ecommerce website. This feature only slows down the site and hence reduces conversion rates. Not to mention that you also end up losing out on link equity every time a new redirect occurs. Rather than redirecting from page A to B to C, reduce it all by directly going from page A to page C. This can be done by plugins available or with the help of basic coding. You will see the difference this will make in your website speed and performance.
- Compress images
Images tend to be the biggest reason for slow sites. Yet, in Ecommerce, you can’t do without them. Rather than eliminating images or using low-quality ones, what you need to do is to optimize them. To do so, you must compress them. Don’t be fooled. Even images that may appear small to you might be carrying a lot of data that inhibits your Ecommerce website from loading quickly.
There are different components that you must consider when optimizing an image. This includes file size, image dimension, and image resolution. File size refers to how massive the file is. Reducing the size is known as compression. Image dimensions are the length and width of the image in pixels while the resolution is the quality of the picture. The sharper the image, the more resolution it has.
To improve your website seed, never opt for an image which has a size larger than 70kb. While dimensions may not be necessary, the resolution is. Find the balance between sharp resolution and acceptable load time.
Conclusion
Use these ideas to improve your Ecommerce site’s loading speed. Make sure no visitor abandons your website because of its slow performance. This is the first step to ensuring better conversion rates than before.