Did you know that 1 in 4 visitors abandons a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load? Besides, 46% of people refrain from revisiting sites with poor performance. These findings clearly highlight that poor site performance and page loading speed can be perilous for your ecommerce business and brand reputation. Sensing people’s inclination toward top-notch ecommerce website performance, even Google has declared web performance as a ranking factor. This calls upon you to focus your energy on website speed optimization and overall web performance enhancement. Here, we’ll dig into 7 actionable strategies for enhancing your page speed and ecommerce site performance.
Fruitful Strategies for Monumental Improvements in Site Performance and Page Speed
1. Pick up a fast and reliable ecommerce platform
When it comes to website speed optimization, your ecommerce platform gets a huge weightage. It should possess the infrastructure required to seamlessly support a nimble website and render incredible page speed. If it doesn’t, your site performance will suffer regardless of what other strategies you execute.
Drupal is a top-notch ecommerce platform that has been developed with website speed optimization at its core. It has numerous embedded modules dedicated to enhancing ecommerce site performance such as Image API Optimize, Fast 404, CDN, and CloudFlare.
Urbany’s, Lush, Olsson and Gerthel, Pam Kerr Designs, and Fooda are some eminent websites leveraging the power of Drupal commerce. If such prestigious organizations have chosen Drupal as their companion, you can rest assured it supports incredible site performance.
2. Employ a content delivery network (CDN)
Using a CDN can take your ecommerce site performance to a whole new dimension. A CDN is a group of servers scattered across a particular region or the world depending on the requirements. These servers temporarily cache your webpage content and whenever a user aspires to load the page, the nearest server deploys the results. This leads to faster loading and better site performance.
Further, it is usually unlikely for a CDN server to experience any issues. But, even if it does, the network can effortlessly initiate a failover process. Consequently, a backup server takes over the failed server and ensures uninterrupted delivery of the desired content to the users. Cutting-edge ecommerce platforms such as Drupal come with modules or features that support seamless CDN integration.
3. Choose a fast and trusted hosting partner
A fast and reliable hosting partner can create quantum positive differences in the overall performance of your ecommerce website. It can lead to jet-speed website loading, top-notch security, and everything else that is desired for incredible site performance.
Moreover, it can also empower your website to deal with traffic surges seamlessly. In stark contrast, an incapable web hosting partner can cause your website to crash during peak load hours and lead to financial and reputational losses.
Given that, it is crucial for you to choose an earnest web hosting companion. If you ponder over how to decide the best hosting partner for you, considering the following points can help.
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Scalability
As your business expands and you begin to attract increasing website traffic, you’ll require to scale your website. Hence, it is advisable to look for a web hosting partner that enables effortless scaling.
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Memory and bandwidth
Your site performance is a direct function of the RAM and bandwidth offered by your web host. Too little RAM can lead to errors and slowdowns. Whereas, low bandwidth can lead to website crashes. So, do not forget to consider both of these factors before choosing your hosting partner.
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Customer support
It is always better to opt for a web hosting partner that offers 24*7 support. After all, every second of downtime can cause enormous business losses and you require immediate addressing of issues to prevent that.
4. Optimize mobile speed with website performance test
Research has revealed that 50% of all ecommerce purchases during the holiday season in 2022 were made through a smartphone. As the fondness for smartphones continues to grow by leaps and bounds, online shopping through mobile phones will shoot up even more.
All this has made incredible mobile compatibility and site performance a foundation for thriving success in the world of ecommerce. So, get all psyched up to optimize your site’s mobile loading speed and overall performance through effective mobile-centric website performance testing. PageSpeed Insights by Google Labs and Test My Site Tool by Google are some ecommerce site performance tools that can aid with the process.
5. Use pop-ups only when absolutely necessary
It is a natural tendency to incorporate pop-ups on the product listings page to simplify the customer journey. However, it is imperative to note that these pop-ups can also be counterproductive. Customers might click on them accidentally which might trigger frustration. They can also slow down your page speed as a lot of data is to be loaded.
What this means is that you should include pop-ups only when absolutely necessary. There is no point in sacrificing your ecommerce site performance and user experience if your customers aren’t clicking the quick view pop-ups. Hindsight, Sumo, and Hotjar are some customer click-tracking software that can help you make an informed decision about whether to keep the pop-ups or not.
6. Decrease the number and size of images
Did you know that large-sized images, uncompressed images, and high-resolution images can significantly enhance website loading time? If you aspire to render incredible web performance, reducing the number and size of images is imperative.
It is possible for you to do so while preserving image quality with tools such as TinyJPG, CompressNow, and Optimizilla.
7. Fix page redirects and broken links
Page redirects are frustrating for website visitors as they lead to slow loading. When encountered with a page redirect, a majority of users abandon websites. Given that, fixing page redirects is a must. So, thoroughly check your website for page redirects and resolve them.
You may have missed removing the old URLs while updating your ecommerce website. As a result, your server will take the visitors through the respective page redirects before bringing them to the latest version of the requested page. As the repercussions of such scenarios can be perilous, try to resolve them as soon as possible.
The same is applicable to broken links. When a user clicks a broken link they get an error message instead of the desired content. Consequently, they abandon your site which negatively affects your web performance. This calls upon you to fix all the broken links at the earliest.
Let’s Wrap Up
The bottom line is that your page speed and overall site performance impact your conversions, reputation, customer retention rate, and almost all other aspects of your ecommerce business to a great degree. Users have an innate inclination toward nimble sites with top-notch performance. Hence, optimizing site speed and performance is the pedestal for captivating the hearts of the users and accomplishing thriving success.
The above-mentioned tactics can beacon you in the right direction when it comes to improving ecommerce site performance. In case you need any kind of assistance with the process, LN Webworks, a reliable ecommerce development company, is always there to help you. Contact us today and give our web developers the opportunity to render their incredible ecommerce web development services to you.
Author Information
Deepak
Deepak has a close to decade of experience working as a brand and digital designer. His experiences with visual design, web design, print design, and animation have established him as a useful force wherever he is able to serve.
