If you have an ecommerce or are thinking about creating your own online store, one of the main factors to consider for success is that your website loads as quickly as possible.
The loading speed of your online store will determine whether the user experience is as comfortable and satisfying as possible. This will have an impact on increasing sales of your products or services.
Why should your online store’s navigation be as fast as possible?
If navigation in your ecommerce is fast and smooth, users will spend much more time on it and the abandonment rate will be lower, as they won’t have to go to another online store to look for the product or service they need. At the same time, if your page takes a long time to load, the bounce rate will be very high, meaning potential customers will leave your website after just a few seconds and choose a competitor instead.
Moreover, those who stay on your website will go through a long and tedious purchase process, which may lead them to abandon their cart, full of potential sales that won’t convert. This will result in a drop in your ecommerce’s conversion rate and also your revenue.
But this is not the only reason why you should take care of your online store’s loading speed. In addition to determining user satisfaction and your sales volume, it also influences your SEO positioning.
One of the things Google, like other search engines, takes into account when ranking any website is its loading speed. Sites that load faster appear in the top search results, among the first positions. This increases the chances that the website will receive more traffic from users, who could potentially become buyers.
Tips to improve your ecommerce speed
Now that you know the reasons why it’s necessary to take maximum care of your website’s loading speed, here are some recommendations to improve this essential aspect.
-Choose the best hosting. Having your ecommerce hosted on a fast and secure server will guarantee your website’s loading speed. In this sense, choose a reliable hosting provider, such as Cuernosoft, which has specific plans for ecommerce and allows you to work with NVMe drives to optimize performance in its hosting, VPS, and some of its Dedicated Server plans. To meet current demands, it also offers GPU technology for projects that need to perform massive calculations in more demanding developments.
-Compress images. The less your images weigh on your website, the faster the loading speed will be. There are many image compression and optimization tools on the market that will help you improve loading times. For example, with TinyPNG or Image Compressor you can reduce the size without losing image quality.
-Enable caching. Implement a caching system to store temporary data from your website and reduce server load times. For example, dinahosting offers Varnish Cache, which you can configure from your client Control Panel.
-Minimize unnecessary code. Remove any unnecessary code from your page to reduce the number of requests to the server. There are tools that allow you to compress code and remove white spaces or any other elements that shouldn’t appear. With them, you can optimize the loading of all your page’s elements.
-Choose progressive loading. If the images on your website only load when they appear on the user’s screen, at the precise moment they are viewed, and not all at once, you will also reduce server request overload and improve loading speed.
-Avoid redirects. The fewer redirects you have to prevent users from ending up on pages that no longer exist, the better. This way, the server will be less saturated.
In addition to these recommended actions, regularly monitoring your ecommerce’s performance is key and will help you determine loading speed and take the necessary steps to optimize it.
In this regard, you can use analytics tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, where Google itself diagnoses your online store. Besides providing you with relevant details and information about performance, you’ll get tips that will be very useful.
