Consider a situation where you’ve always needed a particular design of royal-blue socks. You’ve wanted to have it since mid-year, but the chance to deliberately search online just never came. You’ve been busy at work.
However, it’s Christmas, and in the mood of the festive season, you decided it’s time to gift yourself.
You worked all year; you’ve earned it.
While we’re at it, why not start by gifting yourself the socks you’ve had in mind all this time? That’s right, your royal-blue unique design socks.
Armed with your object of desire in mind, you got on search engines and entered your search query.
Loads of results came back, all in two seconds.
What’s more, a couple of them have the exact design you dreamed of, and you’re beyond happy. But that’s where it all happened, you clicked on the first result, and it just keeps showing loading. Could it be the site’s workload? Anyway, you have no time for delayed searches. There are other things to do.
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Besides, didn’t anyone tell them to ensure their site is in good working order because delayed content loading increases stress levels by 33%.
That’s equivalent to the stress you get watching a horror film or taking math tests. No one needs that, much less customers who have come to exchange their money for some product online, of which a customer-centric atmosphere creates a means to getting. Delayed eCommerce website speed is no customer-centric behavior.
By now, you’ve tried three websites that are so slow, and you’re ready to give up. You agree with the 80% of consumers who claimed that a website’s poor loading time was more annoying than a briefly unavailable website.
The fourth website came through, and you finally placed an order, but you’ve already stressed more than you should anyway, and you promised it’d never happen again.
To prevent a recurrence, you take note of the website that loaded super fast for future purchases.
However, there’s an issue, they did have the socks you wanted, but they’re not guaranteed to have everything you’ll need in the future. You wonder if you won’t need to visit a brick-and-mortar shop to avoid the stress of online surfing.
In another location, a business owner is sure every detail a buyer needs to make an informed purchase is on the website, so why isn’t he getting any sales?
One answer – the low website speed rate. An eCommerce site’s success depends on speed. In addition to enhancing the consumer experience, it has a noticeable effect on sales and conversion rates.
In other words, slower websites may result in reduced sales.
Your eCommerce site’s speed now impacts your SEO rankings in addition to user experience and sales. Speed is a crucial indicator of user experience and a ranking factor for search engines like Google.
Google’s page experience search update emphasizes user experience indicators like bounce rate and website performance. You’ll get more free search engine traffic if your eCommerce website loads quickly.
Why Is eCommerce Website Speed Important?
Fast Website Makes a Good First Impression
The first impression is often the best, especially if it’s good. Your clients, readers, and website visitors instantly form opinions about you and your company.
If your website loads quickly, you’ve already made an excellent first impression. It’s a quick win for user experience, and your new visitor is overjoyed. But a one-second delay costs 7% of the desired conversion rate.
People regard fast websites as professional and dependable. We associate speed with efficiency, trust, and assurance.
Low Bounce Rate
A customer forms an opinion about a website in 50 milliseconds.
Customers will believe the rest of your website is equally unresponsive if they have to wait for a slow search to get results, leaving after only viewing one page and raising your site’s bounce rate.
There will always be alternatives for shoppers because eCommerce competition is at an all-time high. Do not believe that your unique selling proposition or low prices will be sufficient to entice them to interact with your website.
However, they are motivated to browse your product pages and extend their browsing sessions by receiving prompt search results.
Great User Experience
Good website design fundamentally gives your visitors an excellent and straightforward experience. A good user experience is influenced mainly by one thing:
Provide visitors with the information they need quickly.
That is why, when it comes to user experience, website load speed should be your number one priority. Visitors to your website are looking for something specific.
Provide it to them as soon as possible, as 79% of customers who are unhappy with the functionality of a website are less inclined to make another purchase.
You’ve done anything incorrectly the moment your visitors become perplexed or frustrated. Nothing is more irritating than a sluggish website.
Stunted Growth
Nearly half of your potential visitors will leave your website, and you will experience an immediate loss in traffic due to slow loading times. But there’s also a long-term impact at play here. Your natural development and word-of-mouth are slowly stifled by that slow loading time.
Customers that had a terrible experience gradually stopped recommending your service to others. Less frequently do well-known websites connect to your content. Even if it does, readers might decide not to subscribe to your newsletter.
The perception that your website is slow often reflects a lack of credibility, which could eventually harm your brand.
Site Speed Affects Ranking
Google made it plain that they are speed-obsessed with every online product.
To make web pages faster, Google has also made it clear that website owners shouldn’t sacrifice the quality or relevance of their material.
Therefore, teams must ensure that web pages are optimized for speed so websites can rank effectively on Google. Higher rankings result in an increase in organic traffic, which is crucial for organizations.
So How Do You Increase eCommerce Your Website Speed?
Now that we’ve established that website speed is critical for your eCommerce website growth and success in the market, it’s time to explore the ways you can improve your website speed.
Slow website speed can cost you more than a few visits. In time, it could cost your whole business.
| Customers, for example, expect a website to load in 2 seconds, and a 2-second delay can result in a 103% increase in the percentage of bounce rate. |
This article contains nine tips you can try out to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Good Web Hosting
Any improvements you make to your website’s eCommerce performance will be ineffective if your store is hosted poorly.
Not every website hosting provider is the same. To have better performance, you should pick an eCommerce hosting company that complies with the following requirements:
- Provides a reliable and current platform for hosting your eCommerce store.
- It is suitable for use with WordPress or any other eCommerce plugin.
- Their servers are designed to be fast and efficient. This includes built-in storage, security, and other performance-boosting features.
WordPress hosting providers officially recommend SiteGround.
The high-performance Google Cloud Platform is used to power SiteGround servers. They even offer a plugin for their own optimization for web performance and the built-in caching.
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Use Fewer Extensions
To integrate all the functionality they require to operate, eCommerce websites rely on several plugins, apps, and themes. Your website will perform slower, though, if you install an excessive number of these external modifications.
Using fewer plugins is the obvious solution, but this isn’t always possible. As a substitute, you can install extensions that combine the features of many other extensions.
For example, you could use an app like makersfeed to build a unified social wall feature rather than running separate APIs to integrate multiple social networks into your website.
Compared to having separate APIs for each activity, this provides the added benefit of ensuring feature compatibility.
Lazy Loading
If a website takes a long time to load, you can improve the user interface by increasing the speed of the top of the page. The lazy loading strategy benefits websites with much content below the fold.
The display images will load first, followed by all other images. The website will load quickly for the user, and the photographs will load as the user scrolls down the page. As a result, loading times for posts with many images will be significantly reduced.
This is a terrific way to maintain the advantages of having plenty of photos while reducing how long it takes for a site to load.
Enable CDN
Another popular method for improving website performance is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). These networks are made up of numerous servers located all over the world.
When you enable a CDN, your website’s files will be copied and stored on these servers. Users from different continents (or even countries) can access your online store much faster because it will load all data from the nearest server.
Because there are numerous servers, anyone can access your website from anywhere in the world. CDNs can be used on any website, but they are most effective on e-commerce sites with high traffic volumes. Furthermore, it improves search engine rankings.
Compress Media Assets
A successful eCommerce website promotes products using images, videos, and other forms of media. As you add more products, the total size of these resources will grow over time. High-definition content, such as 4K photos and videos, can also burden your server due to their size, slowing down the loading of your website.
The ideal solution to this problem is media compression. Before uploading your image files to your preferred content management system, use a compression tool to reduce their size. The same is true for video and video files.
Use light embeds for your videos instead of directly integrating YouTube content. When a user clicks a lite embed, only the video’s thumbnail loads; the rest is loaded later.
Use Caching Technology
Use caching or in-memory technologies to avoid wasteful database access. These technologies can temporarily store an entire eCommerce product listing, all customer information, site-search indexes, and other data in memory to prevent queries to the database.
The system stores data in the RAM of a server. Performance is improved because RAM input-output operations are usually ten times faster than hard drive operations.
Reduce HTTP Requests
The greater the number of elements on a page, the more requests the browser sends to the server, and the slower the page loads. There are two ways to break the vicious circle and reduce the number of HTTP requests.
The first step is to get rid of any unnecessary extensions, images, or other files. Next, combine several small elements (images, buttons, icons) into a single CSS sprite using tools like CSS Sprites generator and Spritebox.
Redirecting also increases the number of HTTP requests and slows data delivery. You should use the built-in redirect functionality in your navigation panel. Refrain from redirecting URLs to previously redirected pages.
Caching is another method. When visiting your website, customers’ browsers download all of the files from the server. You may have different caching options depending on the CMS you use.
If you run a small e-commerce store, you can use third-party plugins to enable caching.
Minify Your Website Code
There is no getting around the fact that website coding is complex. Furthermore, poorly designed code can significantly impact how quickly your website loads.
Minification is decreasing your code from its original size to the smallest size possible without interfering with the website’s functioning.
When done correctly, minification can significantly improve the speed with which your website loads by decreasing your code by 10 to 90%.
Thanks to the website MinifyCode, this process is quick and straightforward. You might enhance speed by merely using their header links for the type of code you need to compress.
Web Design for Mobile Performance
Never before has a mobile-first strategy been more important. Customers will not always access your store using a desktop computer. What if one of your items is required while they are outside?
They will almost certainly try to access your site using their mobile device, and if it is not optimized, you are screwed. You must keep an eye on the trend because it is growing. 70% of eCommerce site visits are made on mobile devices.
Mobile commerce sales are expected to skyrocket, and Inadequate website optimization or slower website loading speed is a common problem with mobile transactions.
You can resolve this issue by optimizing the mobile performance of your e-commerce site. Remember, people will bounce off a site that is not enabled for their devices, and word of mouth spreads.
In Conclusion
Due to intense competition in the eCommerce sector, businesses are compelled to look for any advantage they can to gain market share.
One such powerful advantage is having a website optimized for speed. By providing a streamlined shopping experience, a fast website will convert visitors into customers more efficiently.
It’s time to determine which of these suggestions can help your website so that your e-commerce can be more profitable by improving user experience and loading speeds.
Resize your photos, use the best animation tools to modify your animations, start observing user navigation patterns, concentrate your expertise and efforts on fixing faults that affect visitors’ interactions with your website today, and track your progress.