Faster the eCommerce website, the faster the user actions and purchase decisions!
You have just 3 seconds to impress your audience and engage them on your eCommerce website. Speed is everything in the digital realm. Everyone wants rapid results; therefore, if your eCommerce website takes too much time, you might lose them. Hence, page speed optimization is vital for your online business/brand for traffic, conversions, and sales.
The ideal web page loading time should be between 0 to 3 seconds otherwise, it may hamper your conversion rate too.
So what contributes to the eCommerce website’s loading time?
The very first thing you must include is choosing the right technology for your ecommerce website. Then focus on all the web page elements including- text, images, videos and links, take time to load. If your eCommerce cannot load this within 3 seconds, it accounts for poor deliverance of user experience. This is the main reason that hampers UX and SEO ranks, increasing the bounce rate.
Studies have revealed that your conversion rates go down by 10% for every second your website takes time to load.
Even search engines like Google take the speed and time of the website as a metric for SEO rankings. If your eCommerce website is lagging in speed or it's taking time to load the elements of the web page, your visitor will immediately bounce from your site.
So, we can say that page speed is a crucial factor that can affect your user experience as well as audience growth.
6 Best Practices For Web Page Optimization
But how can we prevent your eCommerce website from losing its position (rank) in the search engine results or reduce the bounce rate? Here in this blog, learn about the various strategies you can implement to optimize your eCommerce website.
A Robust Website Hosting Provider
One of the primary steps you take to improve your web page’s speed is to choose a proper and efficient hosting provider. The website hosting service provider will help you ramp up your website’s loading speed and as well as performance.
A robust and effective hosting service might weigh heavy on your pocket, but the results are worth investing in. A good hosting provider will prioritize performance along with speed. Additionally, the hosting platform should be updated and optimized to eliminate any time lag.
Remember, don't choose servers that are already sharing their resources. This will load your server and might decrease the eCommerce website’s performance and speed.
Optimize The Website’s Code
You need to secondarily optimize the code of your website and eliminate all necessary elements that pull down your website’s speed. The overlapping functions, whitespaces, comments, strings, and other elements in the backend coding might slow down your website. You can easily optimize your coding files like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files, and improve your website’s speed. You can do this manually or take help from SEO service providers to check your website performance and eliminate all the lagging code files. Additionally, there are various tools available on eCommerce website development platforms that can help you in this task.
Reduce The Load Time For First Byte
We all know whenever any visitor or user enters the URL in the web browser, an HTTP request is sent to the server. This request is processed, and the time taken to process this and relay the response is often said as the loading time. To be specific, the time for the first byte or TTFB is the total time taken by the server to load the first bit of information. The first byte does not usually exceed more than 200ms.
What you can do is you can check the first byte of your eCommerce website by using any tool and then reduce it. You can easily cache the web pages, reducing the burden of the server to load the web page again and again. So, whenever the user types in the URL into the browser server does not need to process the request again. For this, select a robust web hosting provider, as mentioned before. Also, you can easily enable a cache plugin to make this task far easier.
Compress & Resize For Optimized Images
Any eCommerce website is filled up with imagery content aiming to grab the visitor's attention for more interaction. Though images are key to enhancing user experience and making the browsing journey interesting they might slow your website down. Large images make the eCommerce website heavy, and it takes significant time to load. The best solution is to compress/resize the large images but avoid blurring or pixelating them. This way, you can avoid affecting the resolution and select an optimum size for your eCommerce site
You can check the size of the images on the various photo editor apps and then compress and resize them before uploading them. These tools or apps even provide you with the option to choose your desired pixels, to get an optimized image for your site.
Employ Content Distribution Network
A Content Distribution Network or CDN can help the server decrease some load and improve the speed when multiple users send URL requests to the same server simultaneously. A CDN distributes the load by working in hand with the host. Whenever any user requests through an URL, the nearest server processes and responds to it. This thereby reduces the loading time. Additionally, it also caches on global servers and eliminates any lag in the content and other elements in the web pages.
Incorporate Only The Valuable Plugins
Do not go along with unnecessary plugins that are pulling down your website’s speed. The hosting provider may have clubbed some plugins, but you do need to incorporate all of them. Verify every one of them and toggle off all of them. You can use various tools or seek professional help from eCommerce development companies to do a speed test.
Filter out which plugins are essential for your eCommerce website for operational activities and tracking its performance. And then you can delete the rest of those that impact the loading speed, security, and performance of your website.
Conclusion
The main motive of page speed optimization is to deliver prompt results to visitors if there is a traffic surge on eCommerce websites. These best practices will help you to improve your site’s performance, speed, and user experience. The major contribution of web page speed optimization is that it increases conversion rates. Update and optimize your website’s performance by keeping all these in mind. It is a major ranking factor for search engines like Google, and it even improves the user experience for mobile users. Also, if you want to build a free e-commerce website with WordPress check the link.
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