SPEEDING UP YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE COULD MAKE YOU RICHER AND HERE’S WHY
A slow website is quite the same as not having one.
Visitors – your potential customers – can’t really tell the difference if a page is ‘just’ slow, or isn’t working at all. Most users won’t stare at the screen and wait. They move on to the next website and NEVER COME BACK.
Any delay is enough reason to make your customers leave. This converts to lost revenue, which can hurt your bottom-line.
Your website, particularly if it’s for ecommerce site falls under Owned Media—which means, for a complete, 360 Ecommerce Digital Marketing approach to your marketing communications to work at optimum efficiency, your website must work as fluidly and seamlessly as all your other marketing efforts.
According to an Akamai study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds or less. Around 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. 52% also claim that quick page loads are important to gain their loyalty to a site.
Source: MavenCommerce
Microsoft Bing also conducted research about server delays and the effect they have on user behavior. The result – a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%.
Based on these findings, those 2 seconds are crucial to capturing your visitor’s attention, convince them to hang around, and increase your chance for conversion.
It can also affect your SEO Ranking...
Google announced that it has included site speed in its ranking algorithm. If your site speed is slow, it can affect SEO by having reduced rankings. They even launched a new web-based tool, which analyzes the performance of web pages.
If your site speed is slow, it’s time to fix that. Read on.
1. Your Site's Foundation
If it’s the root of the problem, quick fixes won’t help. But what makes a good foundation, and how can you set up a website that runs at lightning speed?
There are three things that come into play:
a. Web Hosting Provider – For an ecommerce site, you shouldn’t go with the cheapest hosting package. They may have limited RAM, processing power, and disk space which won’t benefit your site at all.
These two are the most recommended:
Source: WPEngine
b. Themes – Not all themes are created equal, and not all are extremely fast and well-coded. Checking the demo speed is a must. Tools such as Pingdom will give you an idea of how well-coded it is.
Source: Pingdom
c. Content Delivery Network– CDN is a system of distributed servers that accelerate the delivery of web content, and rich media to internet-connected devices.
Let’s say your server is based in Brazil. Visitors far away from your geographic location will have a hard time connecting to your website. This would result in delayed responses.
With a CDN, browsers will have a nearby server that they can connect to. This will deliver your content much faster. Choosing the right CDN for your website can be tricky. It depends entirely on your needs, and the popularity of your site. WPEngine comes with CDN.
2. Optimizing Web Images
Your customers won’t wait around for that picture to load.
Improve your online store’s performance by optimizing images on your website. It’s a rule of thumb to not let the images look bad or pixelated. So, strike a balance between a good-looking image, and an acceptable image size. Aim for an image size of less than 100KB, but if you can go smaller without compromising quality, then better.
Always check the image size first, before you upload your next product photo, logo, or banner image to your store.
There are three ways to Optimized Images:
a. Photoshop– You don’t have to be a Photoshop wizard. Just open the image on Photoshop, and resize or crop your image to the appropriate size. Here’s a step by step guide on how to optimize your image using Photoshop.
b. WordPress Plugins– There are a few WordPress Plugins like WP Smush that help in stripping hidden, bulky information from your images, reducing the file size without losing quality.
Source: WordPress
c. MS Paint– Use MS Paint as a last resort. That is if you don’t have Photoshop. A downside to MS Paint is that you can’t really set a specific quality for your image.
3. Cleaning Your Database
A database is just like your computer’s hard drive.
It’s where all your data is stored. If you keep it clean and optimized, it can shave a few seconds off of loading speed. Remember, 1 or 2 seconds saved could mean the difference between a bounce and a conversion.
What’s there to clean?
Your database can accumulate many spam comments, trashed comments, copies of post revisions, remnants from plugins you are no longer using, themes, and more. Website performance suffers when it becomes too large and bloated.
For those who have been using WordPress for a while, doing regular clean ups allows you to reduce your database size. This can lead to quicker, and smaller backup files.
You may clean up your website database manually, or use these plugins:
- WP-Optimize – A popular and easy plugin for cleaning your database that allows you to schedule a regular database clean-up.
- WP-Sweep – Uses proper WordPress delete functions that allow you to clean up unused, orphaned and duplicated data. It can also show you a report of how much clutter you can clean.
Want to know more ways of speeding up your online store or website?
Most people can’t stand waiting in lines. And they especially get frustrated when it takes longer than expected. The same goes with visiting a website.
Keep in mind that Google wants the best experience for their users. Page speed is now one of 200 or so signals Google uses to determine rank.
Once you’ve set up a solid foundation, there are still fine-tuning tasks to do! If you need help with speeding up your ecommerce website, get in touch with marketing communications experts who can make sure that your site works as an integral part of a complete, 360 campaign that effectively engages your target market.
Let us help you take a 360 Approach to marketing communications that will help your business Listen, Reach and Engage like never before. Talk to us at NEO360 today.
Let’s talk about your marketing performance!
About the Author
Managing Director
A Mechanical Engineer by training who graduated from the Nanyang Technological University. With over 15 years of experience working in Start-Ups, SMEs and MNCs, he has driven sales revenue and leads across the Asia Pacific region. Shei Wah was one of the SEO Speakers at the first Search Engine Strategies Conference 2011 held in Singapore. As Managing Director, he aims to establish NEO360 in all of the world’s major cities. Even as he works toward this goal, Shei Wah also dreams of his children’s future happiness, and unwinds by doing calisthenics with his former school buddies three times a week.
