Operating a website at lightening speeds is crucial to your bottom line as an eCommerce website owner. Your customers want a website that will load in less than 2 seconds on mobile devices. In fact, a lot of users will click out when websites take too long to load. A slow loading website can be due to a number of things. Picture files are too big, too many product pages, not enough bandwidth, or space in the hosting environment. Whatever the problem you don’t want it to cost you in conversions.
As an entrepreneur you have a lot on your plate, and worrying about your website loading properly is one of them. If you’re not taking it seriously you definitely should. Your eCommerce website performance and load time plays a pivotal role in your customer’s overall experience and ensures that they keep coming back for more. Website users will spend an inordinate amount of time browsing through your product pages, comparing options and prices before they go to checkout that shopping cart. You want all of this to be smooth sailing or risk losing customers.
Your website’s load time impacts performance and plays a big role in the quality of experience your customers have on your website.
Every additional second it takes to load images, scroll through product listing, and complete actions on your website causes resistance and can prevent customers from completing their order. Too much time spent loading a page leaves your business a click away from losing a customer. You don’t want that and neither do we.
You’re in luck, we have a few quick and easy tips to get your site running faster in no time which will improve your overall customer user experience. Let’s get into it.
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Let’s Work on the Foundation First
Having a fast website starts with a great foundation and that means an excellent hosting platform for your website. For a robust solution to host your eCommerce website on we recommend using a VPS Hosting plan. Not only is VPS a faster solution than shared hosting but it packs the punch of a dedicated server but exists in a shared environment so it keeps server costs super low. It’s an affordable plan that enables you have lightening speeds and a customisable server. Even if you’re just starting out or a seasoned website owner, you want to make the switch to VPS hosting to ensure you have speed on the server side.
3 Ways to Speed Up Your Website
1. Enable Caching
Caching is a great hack that saves the result of different operations your site has to perform to produce your final content. It then serves this the “product” for the next visitor to your website even faster. With an excellent caching solution enabled and running, your site will load at lightening speeds. Each time you modify your page, it will load dynamically the first time after the change. At that point, the cache will be restored and the new cached version of the page will load.
For any eCommerce store built with WooCommerce and WordPress, object caching is a great method to save resources, since eCommerce websites use their database even more often than normal sites. By caching content, for example, like product pages, your visitors can browse products quickly and seamlessly. All the content and products they view before adding items to the cart, log in, or checkout can use object caching with an app called Memcached to reduce the demands on the database.
When using full-page caching for an eCommerce store built with WordPress, make sure that you don’t cache the dynamic parts of your site that allow end users to make unique actions. For example, you can’t and shouldn’t cache a cart page or a checkout page; since online shoppers will use and update those pages frequently and input sensitive information, like financial data, during a session on your site. If you cache these pages, you may show the previous customer’s personal data to the new customer and expose it. Therefore Cart, Order, Profile, and other user and order-related pages, should not be in the cache.
2. Optimise Your Images
All websites need beautiful images, especially eCommerce websites. Images beautify your site and are a key selling point for online retail which is a visual shopping experience for customers. They can also slow down your site tremendously and be the top reason it’s lagging.
If your website is built with WordPress, the easiest place to start is to use a plugin to optimize images already on your site. A plugin can reduce the size of your images without damaging their quality and removing all the unnecessary data that your camera saves when you take a photograph (e.g. GPS location of the photo, make and model of the camera used) adds to the overall performance of your site.
With your website, be sure to upload images no bigger than they need to be. If you want to display an image 400×400 pixels, don’t upload a 2024×2024 pixels image and then go through setting it to be shown smaller with HTML or CSS. Resize it before uploading it to your website to save space.
The way your website’s theme and design handles images can also impact your overall website’s performance. While image sliders and carousels are aesthetically pleasing, they typically use a lot of JavaScript to operate which can slow things down. Replacing a slider showcasing multiple images with one static image can cut load time considerably and increase UX and mobile-friendliness at the same time.
3. Optimise your front-end code
WordPress themes use CSS coupled with JavaScript to render attractively functional pages. Additionally, WooCommerce adds even more CSS and JavaScript to support functionalities like the AJAX Cart, order updates, and more—more code means more bulk to your website. Therefore, we recommend having a tool that combines, reduces, and reorders the loading sequence of your CSS and JavaScript files.
To do this use minification and combination. Both techniques have one purpose: to reduce the size and number of JavaScript and CSS files that your website loads. Minification strips all needless symbols by removing bites from being loaded each time you request a URL. Combination alternatively, combines multiple JavaScript and CSS files into one file. This greatly reduces the number of requests your site makes and keeps things moving faster.
In the End, Speed is Necessary
Taking the time to speed up your eCommerce website will ensure that you are constantly adding an amazing UX experience to your customer, coupled with great products to help boost conversions and increase your bottom line. As an entrepreneur with a eCommerce business the functionality of your website greatly adds to your brand awareness and the growth of your reputation. Speed is crucial and should be taken very seriously.
