You may be wondering why you should care about optimizing your ecommerce store for speed. After all, as long as your visitors can get to your site and purchase your products, what does it matter how long it takes for the page to load? However, studies have shown that even a one second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% decrease in conversions. And with the average ecommerce store losing out on $2.6 million per year due to slow loading times, it's clearly an issue that needs to be addressed. So how do you go about optimizing your ecommerce store for speed? In this article, we'll give you some tips and tricks that will help you get your pages loading faster than ever before.
What is Webpage Speed Optimization?
Webpage speed optimization is the process of improving the loading time of a webpage by reducing the size of its files and making its code more efficient. This can be done by minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, compressing images, and using a content delivery network (CDN). There are many factors that contribute to slow loading times, but some of the most common include large file sizes, bloated code, and poor server configuration. By reducing the size of your files and making your code more efficient, you can significantly improve your site's performance. Compressing images is one of the most effective ways to reduce file sizes. Images can be compressed using various methods, including lossy and lossless compression. Lossy compression methods remove some of the image data that is not essential for viewing, while lossless methods preserve all of the image data. Using a CDN can also help improve page speed. A CDN stores static files on multiple servers around the world and serves them to visitors based on their location. This reduces the distance and latency that data has to travel and can improve page load times.
How can Webpage Speed Optimization help your Ecommerce store?
Studies have shown that if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will leave and go to a competitor’s site. If your ecommerce store is slow, you are likely losing out on potential customers and sales. There are different ways to optimize your website speed, including reducing the number of HTTP requests, using a content delivery network (CDN), optimizing images, and minifying CSS and JavaScript. By taking these steps, you can improve your website’s speed and performance, which will in turn improve your conversion rate and bottom line.
What are the benefits of Webpage Speed Optimization for your Ecommerce store?
There are many benefits of Webpage Speed Optimization for your Ecommerce store. One of the main benefits is that it can help to improve your conversion rate. When potential customers visit your store, they want to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. If your site is slow, it can be frustrating and they may leave without making a purchase. Another benefit is that it can help to improve your search engine ranking. Search engines take into account the speed of your site when determining where to rank it in search results. If your site is fast, it will likely rank higher than a slower site. This can lead to more traffic and more sales. Webpage Speed Optimization can also help to reduce your hosting costs. If your site is faster, it will use less bandwidth and resources, which can save you money.
How can you measure the speed of your Ecommerce store's webpages?
There are a number of ways to measure the speed of your Ecommerce store's webpages. One way is to use a web performance monitoring tool, such as Google's PageSpeed Insights. This tool will give you a report on the page's loading time, as well as its size and structure. Another way to measure the speed of your Ecommerce store's webpages is to use a website speed test tool, such as WebPageTest. This tool will allow you to test the loading time of your pages from multiple locations around the world. Finally, you can also use a tool like Pingdom to monitor the uptime and response time of your Ecommerce store's servers. This will give you an indication of how quickly your pages are loading for visitors.
What are some common causes of slow webpages for Ecommerce stores?
There are many potential causes of slow webpages for Ecommerce stores. Some common reasons include: - Using large images that take too long to load - Using excessive animations or JavaScript that can slow down the page - Failing to optimize their website for mobile devices - Having a complex website with too many pages and menus
How can you troubleshoot slow webpages for your Ecommerce store? Here are a few troubleshooting tips to help you identify and fix slow loading pages on your website:
1. Check your server response time
2. Evaluate your hosting plan and it infrastructure, and upgrade it if needed
3. Reducing server load times
4. Review your code and improve efficiency
5. Optimize and compress images
6. Leverage a content delivery network (CDN)
7. Minimize HTTP requests
What are some common tools and techniques for Webpage Speed Optimization?
There are many tools and techniques available for optimizing the speed of your webpages. Some common ones include: - Minimizing HTTP requests: This can be done by reducing the number of elements on a page, such as images, scripts, and stylesheets. - Minimizing file sizes: This can be done by using file compression techniques and optimizing image files. - Reducing server response time: This can be done by using a faster web server or caching static content. - Enabling browser caching: This allows browsers to store frequently accessed resources locally, so they don’t have to be downloaded from the server each time they are needed.
How can you optimize images for faster loading on your Ecommerce store's webpages?
There are several ways to optimize images for faster loading on your webpages: - Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to load images from multiple servers around the globe. This will distribute the load and speed up the loading time. - Use image sprites. This means combining multiple small images into one larger image. The browser can then load the entire image in one go, which is faster than loading each image individually. - Optimize images using a tool like TinyPNG or ImageOptim. This will reduce the file size of the image without compromising quality, thus speeding up loading times.
How can you optimize your Ecommerce store's code for faster loading webpages?
To help you get out every last millisecond you can from your site’s loading speed, we’ve compiled 9 technical tips that will help you get your pages loading as fast as possible.
1. Minimize HTTP Requests: 80% of the time spent on a webpage is spent downloading the different pieces of content that make up the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, etc. An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes to render the page. Reducing the number of on-page components is the single most effective way to speed up a page.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network: A CDN is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the web page and a content delivery server. By hosting your static site content—images, CSS and JavaScript—on a CDN, instead of your own web server, you can dramatically improve loading times by placing this content closer to visitors.
3. Optimize Images: Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page and also often take up more physical space than necessary. There are many ways to optimize images for faster download and execution times including format selection, quality settings and sizing questions.
4. Optimize CSS Delivery: Another way to reduce HTTP requests is by using CSS Sprites—images that combine multiple images into one image file using CSS positioning rules—which SpriteMe makes very easy to do automatically on any web page without having to modify any HTML or CSS code yourself by following these simple instructions after you install their bookmarklet.
5. Minify JavaScript and CSS: Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without affecting how it functions—whitespace characters (space, newline), comments and block delimiters are just a few examples of unnecessary characters that can safely be removed without changing how the code works. Many popular JavaScript libraries have already been minified such as jQuery which has been minified down to about 90% of its original size making it only about 31kb when gzipped compared with its full-size counterpart which weighs in at about 94kb when gzipped even though there is very little room left for further reduction due to how little whitespace there already is in jQuery’s source code. You can further reduce file size—and therefore download time—by compressing your minified files using Gzip which can reduce files sizes down an additional 70%. Tools like HTMLKompressor does an excellent job at compressing HTML markup as well making all three well worth considering adding to your site build process if they aren’t already being used currently
6. Put Stylesheets at Top: Moving stylesheets to document HEAD makes pages appear loading progressively because progressive rendering cannot occur until after external stylesheets are loaded since they specify styling information for displayed elements. If stylesheets are located in document BODY instead then progressive rendering is blocked until after external stylesheets have been fully downloaded causing an unpleasant "flash of unstyled content" (FOUC). While some argue that moving stylesheets from document BODY improves performance because external files are loaded in parallel with rendering rather than blocking it completely while others suggest moving inline styling from document BODY up into document HEAD where it belongs regardless since inline styling also blocks progressive rendering causing FOUC if included anywhere else in document BODY
7. Defer Loading Non-Essential JavaScript Until After Page Loads Completes: If fallback content doesn’t need external JavaScript resources then those files shouldn’t be downloaded until after visible content has finished loading so they don’t block progressive rendering either but there are two different ways this technique can be accomplished
8. Async Loading Of Non-Essential Stylesheet Resources: In addition Stylesheet objects also have an "alternate" property
9. Designate non-essential CSS: This property allows authors to designate certain style sheet resources as non-essential "alternate" resources that really shouldn’t be downloaded until after the primary stylesheet resources have finished downloading since they are non-essential for displaying basic page style & layout(although not always content since some layouts do require secondary stylesheet resources to display correctly).
All this will help you to speed up your ecommerce store.
Heed help for your ecommerce site optimization - contact us at https://www.deondesigns.ca/contact-us/
