Friday, 4 August 2017

Supercharge Your Ecommerce Website Speed – Tips to Reduce Loading Time


Website page loading is an important part of overall site experience. Getting your Ecommerce website to load quickly is an absolute need for inbound marketing success. A seamless ecommerce site page load process helps viewers to be tuned with your site.
Page loading time is the average time taken for a page to show up on screen.

Improving your ecommerce website speed is a constructive way to ensure you are performing at its best and gaining better quality leads for your business. Consequently you will make more satisfied customers with significant increase in sales conversions. This can be done through the best web development service provider.

Factors That Influence Your Ecommerce Website’s Performance and Suggested Recommendations

• Too Many HTTP Requests – When your customers visit your ecommerce website, your browser request for information like CSS, Javascript and HTML from the website. These browser requests are the HTTP server requests. Many http requests may lead to longer time for the browser to fetch data from the site. These server requests can slow down your ecommerce store’s user experience.

Recommendation – By combining individual CSS or JavaScript files into an organised stylesheets or reducing the social buttons and images, this will minimize the amount of http requests. You can also improve the website speed by ensuring file paths inside the CSS scripts are correct.

Unnecessary Plugins and Third-party Widgets – Installing too many plugins to your website will slow down the loading time. This is caused by the ability of web browser to “read” plugins. Flash is considered as browser heavy application which will have serious impact on loading times.

Recommendation – Remove unnecessary plugins that make your ecommerce website load slowly. Disable the suspected plugin, measure the site’s performance. In this way you can find the plugins that slows down your website.

• Not Optimizing Images – Too many images in an ecommerce website page will take a longer loading time. If a large size image is uploaded, the server will take time to load the image in its entirety. Bigger the file size, longer the loading time it will take.

Recommendation – Use JPG type images as it is smallest and faster loading type.
PNG type can be used for images with text and in need of transparent background. For WordPress websites, installing WP Smush.it can reduce the file size without losing visual quality.

Bad webhosting – A bad web hosting that is not able to serve your ecommerce website needs is an important element in slow loading of site. In view of website’s performance hosting server plays an inevitable role. When the server takes a longer time to respond for the page load request, it will reflect in the loading of website. No matter how much you optimize your ecommerce site, a sluggish web hosting will make your site too sluggish.

Recommendation – Choosing a reliable web hosting service is a smart move to boost up your website speed. Prefer a hosting company that back up its current servers and good uptime.

Browser Compatibility and Failure to leverage caching– Browser compatibility is an important factor for website performance. They act like programming code translators and interpret data that is sent by servers. If the browser cannot read the data, the resulting page loading is slow.

When your customer visits your ecommerce site, a series of requests are made. If static content is not cached, while visiting the site every time it will take time to retrieve data. This results in slow loading time.

Recommendations – Certain web pages that do not change can be saved in temporary storage or user’s cache for fast retrieval. This can reduce the loading time; especially it will work great for a constant visitor.

Too Many Redirects – Redirecting happens when a visitor enters a particular website need to be redirected to another site or location. This act of redirecting needs computing efforts, consumes more time.

Recommendation – Limit your redirects unless it is absolutely necessary. In addition be aware that it is not redirected to irrelevant domains. This will overload the server making your ecommerce website slow.

·      Broken links – Broken links causes your ecommerce website to load slow as it requires HTTP request response. Hence it is mandatory to mind your broken links.

Recommendation – Whether it is a broken link or image fix it immediately to provide your ecommerce user a wonderful experience with your website. WordPress platforms have their own broken link checker to resolve this issue.

Today’s typical customers expect their online web pages to load in 3 seconds.  Your ecommerce website performance and speed is a top-notch concern for higher click through rate and better quality leads for your business. Minding the factors that slows your web page loading time and optimizing your website speed is a great way to get your users a faster and happier experience that will be converted into sales.
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