Website navigation and speed play a significant role in the success of online business. Attractive offers and discount coupons are no longer sufficient to stay ahead of the competitor. User experience is critical these days and it includes site reliability, speed, and smooth navigation. Among these factors, speed has a big role in conversions. Moreover, the loading time is the deciding factor in search engine results.
High-performance E-commerce websites often improve return visits, bounce rates, conversions, ranks in organic search, and user experience. Slow websites are usually avoided by buyers and ruin your reputation. Lowering the website load time, positively impacts the marketing and sales processes. You’re going to get higher traffic and drive more qualified leads that can be converted into clients.
1. Use CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed over several geographical locations offering web content to end-users in reference to their location. Earlier all user requests were served from the same server and it increases the time required to process every request thus site becomes slow. With the content delivery network, user requests are served from the closest server. This ends in quicker delivery of content and the E-commerce website works faster.
2. Reliable Hosting
A trustworthy web host is important to boost website performance and optimization. There are mostly three types of host:
- Dedicated servers are an expensive hosting option. This approach provides a dedicated server, as they are your own physical servers. In addition, you can consult a system administrator to manage it. You have complete control of the server and its resources.
- Virtual Private Servers are faster and comprise of multiple servers for the content distribution. VPS allows you to make several changes on the virtual server without affecting other users over the server.
- Shared hosting is the most popular hosting all over the world as it’s cheaper and will take the least time to deploy your e-commerce website. Shared hosting has several benefits like sharing of the disk space, RAM and CPU with multiple websites that use the same server. This is one of the major reason behind this type hosting slow speed as compared to dedicated server and VPS.
3. Quality Images
One of the major approaches of the conversion is to provide customers a real experience with high-quality images. Make them feel the product as if they’re purchasing items from a physical store. Having high-quality images helps to drive buyers. A lot of product images and graphics on the site pages improves the engagement but also slows the website with large sizes. You can use multiple compressing tools for the pictures without compromising its quality or responsiveness. The product description also requires proper precision by offering a solution to the client’s pain points.
4. Reduce Plugins
Plugins are important features of every E-commerce website. They add engaging components suggested by third parties. Unfortunately, several plugins need more resources to execute. This ends into the slower working of the E-commerce website and results in security errors. It’s important to identify all the plugins installed and remove the unnecessary ones. This can be done by running performance tests on the website to identify which plugins are slowing the website. Website performance and speed depend on the quality of the plugins. Avoid plugins that load several scripts and generate several database queries.
5. Reduce Page Size
The size of the page is measured in kilobytes. The page comprises several elements like images, JavaScript, and CSS. Pages smaller in size usually load fast. Stop inserting high-resolution images on the web page; design pages by keeping load speed a priority. It is simple to measure the page size by saving the page as an archive folder from the browser. Users prefer websites that load in 3 seconds or less, else the visitor will switch to another online store. In that situation, ensure the website load fast with richer graphics.
6. Implement Caching
Implementing caching is a renowned technique to stop accessing the database unnecessarily. When a buyer request for a product, its request is processed from the database that needs a few seconds. But with caching the complete store product catalog is stored in the memory temporarily. In addition to that all customer details, indexes, and other essential details are stored, ultimately improving the store speed. In the caching technique, the RAM present on the server is utilized and data is saved in it. The processing is basically 10 times faster on RAM in comparison to the hard disk, and this boosts the performance.
7. Eliminate Redirects
Minimize the redirects on the website to maintain its speed. Each redirect grows a request to the server that increases the load times. Usually, the retailers redirect the old links to the new links, this slows the website. These redirects should be removed when buyers have started visiting the new links directly. Website visibility is affected if your E-commerce site speed is slow. To get a good ranking on the search engines, speed is a crucial factor to consider. People prefer exploring a website if it appears on the first page of the SERP. Traffic reaches to the website that appears on the first page of SERP.
WRAPPING UP:
The modern buyers have so many options to buy a product, and they expect a website page to load in 3 seconds. If your website is not optimized properly to meet buyer expectation, you’ll lose a potential buyer and website traffic. This is a major reason behind an E-commerce website low sales & revenue. Consider applying these easy yet powerful website speed improving approaches:
- Start the optimization by eliminating all the factors that reduce the speed and focus on the pages that improve the conversion rate.
- Analyze the important elements of the website success; usability, conversion, and visibility.
- Monitor your website speed and pages that require the most attention.
The tips and benefits of fast loading speed should be sufficient to help you in website speed optimization and improving the site’s performance for fast conversions.
Elina Reddy is the Sr Magento Developer in Magento Store – an acclaimed Magento Development Company worldwide. She is also a passionate blogger in the technology field. She loves to share knowledge and writing about the best practices, tips, tools, trends in web design & development especially in Magento.