A fast-loading and reliable E-commerce website are essential for a successful business venture. Even if your online store is running smoothly, any sluggishness in performance can lower down the sales. It is widely observed that pages which load in minimum 2 seconds are considered as fast and optimized. Visitors also prefer exploring websites having such a fast loading speed. A few seconds of delay can cause 10% drop in page views and 5% drop in conversion as per experts. Speed also plays a significant role in SEO technique. You can easily address this situation by hiring Magento E-commerce development firm having appropriate resources. Apart from hiring, you can follow these important guidelines to increase E-commerce website speed mentioned in the blog post.
1. High-Capacity Servers
The more web traffic you have, the more data you have to store, which means the server capacity needs to be improved. A server with less free space needs extra time to load the page, which leads to missed sales. Managing insufficient server power needs buying more space from the hosting provider. Implement load testing to find out your website is capable to handle a high amount of web traffic, particularly during the festive season. Don’t ignore such a crucial factor, make some smart move.
2. Optimize Images
High-quality pictures look amazing, but they slow down the loading of website making customers so annoyed that they abandon your website. Make sure proper image optimization is done before posting it on the website. Optimizing bring down the load times, even reduce the time to half in some scenarios. PNG images look incredible but slow down the website load times, easily taking five times the data used by a JPEG image. If the image size is bigger than an icon, make sure JPEG image is featured unless pristine image can be integrated.
3. Reduce Page Size
The page size is usually measured in kilobytes. Page size includes all elements like images, JavaScript, and CSS. Fast loading pages are usually smaller in size. Avoid inserting big objects or high-resolution images on the web page; design your pages by keeping load speed a priority. Page size is easy to measure by saving the page as a web archive folder from the web browser. Try to speed up the load times to 3 seconds or less, else the visitor of the site will move to another online store. In that scenario, find the perfect balance between fast load times versus posting richer graphics.
4. Use Caching
Use a caching or in-memory technique to stop accessing the database unnecessarily. When a visitor request for a product, usually its request is completed from the database that takes a good amount of time. But with caching the whole store product catalog is temporarily stored in the memory. Apart from that all customer details, site-search indexes, and other important details are stored, which speed up the store speed. In caching the RAM available on the server is utilized and data is stored in it. The input-output operations are basically 10 times quicker on RAM in comparison to hard disk, and this helps in improving performance.
5. Set Image Dimensions
Specify the image height and width so that the web browser can create placeholders for them, to load them simultaneously with the page. Online store merchants usually create an image without mentioning the dimensions of the image. This forces the web browser to completely load the image before starting another task, which takes additional time. Mentioning height and width in advance for each image makes the web browser to know the size of the image and it can make space for the image as well while loading other parts of the page. In addition, it automatically alters the size of the images for different kinds of devices like laptop, mobile or tablet.
6. Reduce HTTP Requests
As per reports, 70% of load time is used in downloading different parts of the page like image, content, and scripts. For every element different HTTP request is made, so with a high number of elements, the longer it will take to render. To address this situation minimizes your requests and identify how many requests your website currently makes. If you have the Google Chrome web browser, you can use Developer Tools to find out different HTTP requests that your website makes. Lowering the number of requests will boost the E-commerce website performance, check your files and find out the unnecessary ones.
7. Advanced Coding
Your development team can reduce the load times with advanced programming techniques that lower the HTTP requests a page make. It stores frequently used files in the RAM locally on devices so that files don’t require reloading of the page. Advanced programming methods like splitting up page elements loading via AJAX and configuring server-side page caching can definitely boost the load times.
8. Avoid Redirect
Minimize redirects on the website if you want to speed up it. Each redirect is a different request to the server that increases the load times. Usually, retailers redirect from old links to the new ones, causing the website to slow down. These redirects should be eliminated when most buyers have started browsing the new URLs directly.
A website visibility is also affected if site speed is slow. Most of the search engines consider speed a crucial factor of ranking. People will get to know about a website if it appears at first page of SERP. Traffic reaches to the website that appears on the first page of SERP.
Conclusion:
There may be countless reasons that can affect the speed of your E-commerce website, but for optimization check whether the website is correctly cached or not, images are compressed and useless modules are removed. These factors if properly managed with proper redirection removal can put your E-commerce website high in performance. A properly optimized website always appear in top position in search engine results and appreciated by the visitors as well. If you are searching for better results and immense performance, just follow these steps in a proper manner. These steps will help you to get the appropriate results and quality solutions. These steps will help you to build an engaging and appealing E-commerce website.
