Top 6 Tips to Improve Your E-commerce Site Speed

Site speed makes a dramatic impact on your site’s performance. In fact, if page loading time goes from one second to 10 seconds the probability of a visitor bouncing increases 123%, which means losing potential customers. Google knows its importance, so speed rate is one of the characteristics considered in ranking websites in their famous and widely used search engine.

Having an e-commerce store that loads fast is essential for your site. Small details on your website can make it load faster, such as friendly mobile design, compressed images, less animations, among other things. To help you identify what can be done, in this article we share a few of our tips to improve the speed of your site:

Research shows that people will bounce off a site that is not powered for their devices. Users like to navigate websites comfortably wherever they are and from whichever device they’re using. This means that they often scroll through your content from their phone, so having an approachable design for their device is mandatory.

Mobile navigation is taking up the main stage in internet navigation, which means that only responsive designs may not be enough. Building websites specifically for mobile (mobile-first design) can upgrade a user's experience and make it an enjoyable and recurring activity.

Heavy images will slow down your website. Make sure that they’re compressed and exported in the ideal file format for websites. Of course, it’s important to design an eye-catching page with beautiful images and graphics, but if it's giving loading time problems, users will leave and won’t even get to know your brand.

   3. Lazy load images

Nevertheless, not using images may not be the greatest option, you still want to have nice images and graphs to make it an interactive website. For this, lazy loading is a great solution!

It provides images from the start of the page and then slowly collects the rest of the image’s data as the user scrolls down, so the site doesn’t take too long to load. This is a great method to keep the benefits of using numerous images in a site and at the same time cut off the incredible amount of time they take to load.

Javascript animations can enhance your customers' navigation - but be careful, too much of them can slow down your site. Using coding such as requestAnimationFrame, can better manage the execution of your animation code. Another great solution for optimizing it is to minify your coding, this means removing any unnecessary elements like whitespaces, characters, combining files and more.

Developers can easily get lost in optimizing features that are exciting and complicated, but maybe are not important or relevant for the user. Focusing on solving the issues that affect directly the user’s navigation experience reduces budget and time

A way to approach this is by using Service Level Objective, with it you can set goals and targets for the performance of your site based on your users’ needs and navigation patterns.

Analyze the pattern of requests your users make. It helps identify if the customer is close to getting to the limit of requests a browser will make, this prevents it from reaching a certain limit that could make your website unavailable or make it crash.

   Final Thoughts

Your e-commerce can be more profitable by having better loading times and having a friendlier experience for users, so it’s time to identify if any of these tips can improve your website. Resize your images, edit your animations, start noticing users’ navigation patterns, focus your energy and knowledge on improving errors that change customers' interaction with your site and measure your success!

Small modifications will make your speed site faster and therefore will push your conversion rates higher.

If you’re interested in building a faster website for a better performance, we have a wide range of experts that can help you out, contact us for a quote: info@uassistme.com