How to Speed up Your e-Commerce Website

These days, advances in technology occur at a rapidly increasing rate. One of the most obvious changes has been the increasing speed of the internet, which mirrors the increase in the number of internet users around the world. If you’re an online retailer, making sure that your website loads quickly is not always easy. Many e-commerce sites experience problems that slow down their performance.

This fact should concern you, as customers are much less likely to purchase items from your online store if your website loads slowly. Even if you have a fantastic selection of items for sale, potential customers are likely to turn to your competitors if they experience undue delays in accessing your site. Even a one-second delay can cause you to lose revenue, so increasing your site’s loading speed deserves careful attention. Here are a few suggestions that can help your site load faster and make it more likely that you can convert visitors into paying customers and generate more income.

Use caching technology whenever possible

Caching technology makes it possible for you to store critical information, such as search indexes, customer profiles and product descriptions, without making repeated calls to your database. By reducing unnecessary access to your database, you can utilise your server’s RAM to store data and dramatically improve response time, as input-output transactions conducted using RAM are up to ten times quicker than those conducted on a hard disk.

Use a content delivery network

If you want to have a site that loads quickly, you need to use a robust content delivery network (CDN). There are several significant advantages of using a CDN if you have an international customer base, especially if you have conducted an analysis of your sales data to identify where your customers live. You can store content on servers located where your customers are, and customers can then load content from those servers rather than from one central server, thereby reducing your page loading time.

Reduce page size

Images can be a major contributor to page size. If you reduce the size of images and other embedded objects, you can reduce the page’s loading speed considerably. You need to find the correct balance between using rich graphics and page loading speed, with the objective of maintaining a loading time of three seconds or less.

Make your site mobile friendly

These days, more than 50% of website traffic occurs on mobile devices, and this trend continues to grow, making it important to ensure that your website provides mobile users with a reliable and fast service. Also, if you don’t optimise your website for mobile devices, it is likely that you will experience lower rankings in search results, which could adversely impact your sales. Since mobile devices have less processing power than desktop computers and can have difficulty rendering complex pages properly, it is crucial to ensure that your site loads quickly with complete functionality on mobile devices.

Use efficient coding

Efficient coding can reduce the number of HTTP requests that your site makes, thereby improving the time it takes pages to load. By storing frequently used information, they don’t require reloading on every page.

Following these tips should help your site load faster and improve both customer experience and sales.