8 Ways To Make Ecommerce Websites Load Faster
A user-friendly website, with efficient loading time, goes a long way in retaining visitors and hence improving conversion rates. Even a slight delay can have a material impact on the daily revenue for online retailers. If dissatisfied, customers are less likely return. Monitor the page overview stats on Google Analytics to get a good insight into the site’s page loading times, server response time and other essential metrics to get a peek into its overall performance. Here’s listing some of the ways in which you can optimize your website’s loading time: • Hosting The hosting service that you use will influence the way your site performs, especially during a spike in traffic during sales days. Use fast and reliable hosting to prevent any crashes and abrupt breakdowns which will likely send your site into a downtime, before a fix is found. The result is sales lost and bad publicity. Check to see if you have the bandwidth capacity to handle a high volume of traffic and scale accordingly using the best estimates for incoming traffic on critical days. • Image Sizes Image sizes will contribute to your page loading times. Removing them entirely is not a smart move. Nothing bedazzles users like a content-centric image. Restrict quality via compression, resize down and use very few of them and make them interact effectively. Even the carousel
thumbnails sizes can be brought down while retaining quality. Go with the JPEG format on-site images to avoid wasting rendering time. • Content Delivery Network Master servers take time to deliver data to a customer located on the other side of the world. The use of cache on a local server leads to lower response time, in other words, leverage data centers around the world, now for a customer the same page is loaded from the center located the closest, reducing loading times. • Redirects Redirects create more load on the server since they create additional HTTP requests and delay transfers, which will then affect the loading times and therefore the speed. As such it is in best practice to keep them to a bare minimum. • Plugins Plugins can do a lot to enhance the user experience, from adding custom functionality to cleaning up your code and the fact that they are very easy to install. However, having too many plugins can slow your site, bring security issues, and even cause crashes & other technical difficulties. Deactivate the redundant ones and only retain the ones use need. • Asynchronous Loading CSS and JavaScript can be loaded both Synchronously or Asynchronously. If your scripts load sequentially, they load in the order they appear on the page. If your scripts load asynchronously, few of them will load simultaneously. When a browser loads a page, it moves from top to bottom. If it gets to a script that is synchronous, it will stop loading until it has fully loaded that file. If that file were asynchronous, the browser could continue loading other elements on the page at the same time. This functionality is to make certain elements load without waiting for external resources & without blocking page content. • Popup Windows Don’t make the already time-starved customers, go through an additional step, which can be clicked on even accidentally, creating a redirect and wasting more time. Often pop-up implementations will pre-load all the information, which may be an enormous amount of data to be loaded, causing the site to slow down considerably. • Caching Utilize caching where possible, so you wouldn’t have to access the database every time. Since it doesn’t load the data that is not needed. It stores the data temporarily into the memory,
instead of loading it from the server. This utilizes the RAM on the server and works well for repeat customers, where all the customer information, site-search indexes, and other information are stored conveniently, which in turn improves performance. Get in touch with our ecommerce experts to optimize your online store.