A fast-loading and reliable website is vital to the success of your e-commerce business

Even if your site is running smoothly, any loss in performance can cause major implications for your business.

It is already widely known that web pages have to load within two seconds or less to risk losing visitors. Moreover, a study suggests that a single second delay of your page loading time will cause your page views to drop by 11 percent, and a 7 percent drop in conversion.

Speed is a crucial factor in helping your site rank for SEO. In this post, we are going to go over the tips on how to speed up your e-commerce site effectively:

Use a reliable web host

A lot of times, an online store owner chooses the cheapest hosting provider in the market.

But as your online site scales over time, you need to face the prospect of upgrading your hosting plan or even consider switching your hosting provider.

Depending on the type and size of your online store, make sure that you pick one that best fits the needs of your e-commerce website.

Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box and pick the web solution that works best for you.

Optimise your images

File compression is the process of decreasing the size of your images, but with little to no reduction in the overall image quality.

Compression is not only a practical technique to use, but it also helps reduce the load times of your product pages. Doing so helps decrease the overall data that are served to the customer bandwidth and for taking up less digital storage space on your hosting server.

By using less bandwidth and storage space, you could help save money in your overall web hosting plan.

Reduce the number of your redirects

Every time a page redirects to another page, the user needs to wait for the HTTP request-response cycle to be completed. This increases the amount of time a site needs to take to load.

The overall situation worsens if there is a redirect chain in place. For example, page A is redirected to page B, which is then redirected to page C.

While there are a lot of legitimate reasons why you need a redirect, you should also remember that they cause significant speed and performance issues.

Each time you remove or clean-up a redirect, it makes your page load faster.

Enable caching

Caching is an excellent technology that saves a website output on your site visitor’s browser. Thus, they do not need to make a server request every time they visit your website.

With a great caching solution, your website will be as fast as a static page.

Every time you make changes on your page, it will dynamically load the first time after modification. Afterward, the cache is refreshed, and a new cached version will load.

Use GZIP compression

GZIP compression is a popular method that is utilised to decrease the size of your web files. This includes your CSS, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript.

As a result, the speed of your site gradually improves because users will just download the compressed data instead of full-sized files.

Moreover, Google also considers page loading time as one of the main factors in its ranking algorithm. The faster your website will load, the higher you will rank.

Utilise a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network, also known as a CDN, is made up of a group of servers that are distributed around the globe.

It will disseminate the content delivery load with a server that is closest to the user’s location, and as a result, making the local experience faster.

Remove unnecessary plugins

Most e-commerce sites rely heavily on plugins, third-party apps, and themes to fully implement the features and functionalities they want on their e-commerce site.

But you might also end up installing too many of these plugins, causing your site to load slowly. The most obvious solution here is to use fewer plugins. However, in some cases, it’s not always feasible.

As an alternative, you can install extensions that integrate the features of multiple other extensions. Let’s say that you run out of APIs to integrate various social networks on your site. You can utilise an app to implement a more unified social wall feature.

Reduce HTTP requests

The total number of your HTTP requests, as well as your server response time, are other factors that could also potentially slow down your site.

The more requests that you receive, and the longer the server response time, the longer it will take for your page to load fully.

The number of requests will depend on the amount and type of content on your page which is expected to load. Every JS, picture, CSS file, and every other separate page element will help create a separate HTTP request.

Over to You

Now that you know that effective ways to boost your website’s speed, it is time to optimise your ecommerce store. That way, you can easily turn your traffic into revenue and impress site visitors with great user experience.

Keep in mind that most of the tips we have listed in this article could easily be implemented, even if you are the most non-tech savvy person. All you need to do is to try to eliminate these performance issues that could slow down your site.

It is high time that you speed up your e-commerce site today and start seeing the difference.