12 Ways to Speed Up Your Ecommerce Site

How Page Speed Get Affected on Ecommerce?

To understand it better first you need to know what actually page speed is. Basically, the page speed is the time the site takes to open, the faster it is, the more engagement it will bring and vice versa. Page speed is the amount of time it takes for a URL’s content to load. Site speed, on the other hand, represents how well the website performs in general. It is rated by resources such as Google PageSpeed Insights, which measure different load times on your web.

It has been found out in various studies that the consumer gets easily irritated when the website takes time to load which results in less conversion and no conversions at all. Most online shoppers want websites to load within 2 seconds. If you really want to bring conversions or sales the most important thing is to work on the page speed. Time delay can seriously affect the conversion and sales of ecommerce.

Ways to Grow Your Ecommerce Site Performance & Speed

Now coming to the most important part if there is any way to improve the ecommerce site performance and speed. Of course, there are many things one can do to improve site speed. Below we are going to highlight some ways, just hang in there with us.

1. Study Poor Performance :-

It’s important to note that the site load speed refers to the speed of a single tab. It does not reflect the whole website. The amount of text, CSS and JS files, and photos on various types of pages can vary. As a result, the size of each page will vary significantly, requiring varying periods of time to completely load certain pages. It’s almost impractical to go through every section of an online website. As a result, you can examine the homepage, segment tab, and feature page individually in order to do a thorough results audit. These are the most popular consumer entry points, and they should all work flawlessly. Thankfully, we have Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free service available in the market. It is used to see how quickly the website sites display on mobile and desktop devices. In a nutshell, the system compares the website’s vital success measurements to the Chrome User Interface Report.

2. Compact and Reduce Images Size :-

It is important to have the proper size of an image on your website. Any image must be no larger than 1,000 pixels. Anything outside of the context wastes rendering time. You could either upgrade your one-off instance such as many people go overboard with their carousel sliders or use sites like TinyPNG for JPEGOptimiser to compact your files. High-resolution photographs are perfect for the website to give it a more polished look. JPEGs, on the other hand, load faster, and load time is an important factor in the conversion rate. If you really must use a PNG file, make sure to find, organise, and compress broad photos with FreeConvert.

3. Delete Unnecessary Plugins :-

Now as we all know most of us, prefer to install plugins on our site as they are easy to install plus they make messy stuff a cakewalk. Not just this, they remove the need to fiddle with a lot of coding, resulting in a much more user-friendly experience while operating on the platform. Because of this only we install plugins on our website without thinking about anything else. However, a lot of plugins on our website can literally slow it down and downgrade our sales. It makes the site load slowly, triggers security problems, or even causes accidents and other technical issues. Removing and deleting those plugins that are no longer required will increase the overall pace while still making maintenance smoother in the long run. Also, you can give try to Plugin Performance Profiler, it will jot down all the plugins that are causing issues on your store.

4. Review Third-Party Extensions :-

The other thing which causes harm to our store is third-party extensions which we install to ease our work. Know that installing them in an appropriate amount won’t do any damage but excessive of everything is bad. A large amount of custom functionality, as well as bad content, unstable code, and other problems found with third-party integrations, will cause the site to load slowly. The thing which you can do to overcome this is to start reviewing the third-party extensions. You may need to balance the benefits and drawbacks. Then remove any plug-ins that are no longer in operation or don’t have adequate features.

5. Optimise the Time to First Byte :-

In relation to the data it takes for your website to completely load, you can also consider the time it takes for it to begin loading. The time it takes for a user to receive its first byte from the server is known as the time to first byte or TTFB. A TTFB for a site should be under 200 ms is recommended by Google. This is a server-side issue, unlike many of the front-end success variables which most site owners rely on. The thing you need to pay attention to is DNS lookup, server processing and response. It’s essential to bear in mind that your Internet access will influence response time. A DNS is a server that maintains a directory of IP addresses and domain names. The method of locating a single DNS record is referred to as a DNS lookup. The method can be accelerated by switching to a quicker DNS provider.

6. Reduce HTTP Requests :-

The greater the number of items on a page, the more queries the browser sends to the database, and the slower the page loads. There are a few options for breaking the negative spiral and lowering the number of HTTP requests. The very first step is to remove all unwanted extensions, photos, or other files. Then, using software like CSS Sprites generator, CssSpritegen, and Spritebox, merge multiple small elements into one CSS sprite. Another strategy is caching. Customers’ browsers download all of the data from the cloud each time they visit the site. You could have various caching options depending on the CMS you use.

7. Start Using CDN :-

Using a CDN is yet another common way to improve website efficiency. These networks are made up of a number of servers spread across the globe. Your site data will be downloaded and saved on these servers until you allow a CDN. When visitors from various continents or countries visit your online shop, all files are recorded from the database that is nearest to them, enabling the page to launch much quicker. CDNs are useful for all types of websites, but they are particularly well suited to e-commerce sites with heavy traffic volumes. It also boosts search engine results as a result of performance metrics optimisation. A CDN link, in general, aims to improve overall site speed and make bigger website maintenance easier.

8. Change the Hosting :-

E-commerce startups sometimes opt for the cheapest hosting option for their online marketplace. However, if internet shopping increases in popularity and traffic, merchants can need to update their hosting plans or even switch providers. There are many hosting plans available out there. The very first on the list is Shared hosting which is ideal for small e-commerce businesses with a limited range of items. When you use shared hosting, you utilize the same services such as CPU, RAM, and so on as other websites based on the same server. The next on the list is VPS hosting that incorporates the benefits of pooled and specific form into one package. This choice allows you to share a single hosting account with several sites while still having access to certain dedicated server services. Lastly, the dedicated servers are the most expensive choice, but you get full control of the hosting. It is ideal for stores with lots of traffic.

9. Use Lazy Loading :-

If a website takes a few seconds to load, you can boost the user interface by making the top of the page portion load quicker. Lazy loading is a technique that is particularly useful for sites with a lot of material below the fold. It will load the images inside the display first, then all of the other pictures later, thanks to lazy loading. The user won’t have to wait long to get to the website, and the photos will load as they appear. This will drastically minimise the amount of time it takes for posts with a lot of photos to load. Installing this plugin is an easy task. There are various plugins such as Lazy load, BJ Lazy load, WP Rocket and much more.

10. Boost Mobile Performance :-

The thing which is also crucial is to monitor mobile performance. Keep an eye on how well your site performs on smartphones and tablets. PageSpeed Insights is a Google app that provides you with customised recommendations for improving the success of your mobile site It also flags elements on your pages that slow the website down, such as CSS and JavaScript. You may also examine the success of your rivals’ mobile sites. Knowing what went wrong on their website will help you from making the same errors.

11. Use Minify Code :-

A mechanism named “minification” was developed by Google Developers. This procedure aids in the removal of badly written CSS, HTML and Js from your web page, which can cause performance issues. You can try looking for codes on Github.

12. Minimise Broken Links and Redirects :-

A large number of redirects and broken connections will slow down your web and hurt your SEO rankings. Cleaning up the redirects is a good idea. 302 redirects which imply that a page has been relocated, can harm SEO. They often cause extra HTTP requests and file transfer to be delayed. Using a “cacheable redirect” seems a good option. Further, don’t ever redirect the page to the site which is also a redirect. Broken connections for page items such as photos, CSS, and Javascript files trigger further HTTP requests, slowing down the web. Delete them with software like Broken Link Checker. Further, making a new 404 error can assist users who access the site’s URL incorrectly.

Conclusion

That’s all! Here we have provided full disclosure on what ecommerce store owners need to do to improve site speed. Site speed is important because it brings traffic and conversion, it should not be overlooked in any case. Most ecommerce store owners are not even aware that they are losing potential customers just because of the site speed. When they know they find the task of fixing it daunting. If that’s the reason for worry lines on your head then you definitely sigh in relief as there are many ecommerce website management companies available in the market. And one such company is RVS Media, the finest ecommerce agency in the UK.

So what exactly are you waiting for? Improve your site speed and let us know all about it in the comments section.