How to Boost Site Speed for E-commerce Stores and Why it Matters
There’s nothing more frustrating than a slow website.
Okay, maybe that’s not true, but still: in the field of e-commerce marketing it should be considered a cardinal sin to have your website take too long to load.
A difference of mere seconds can have drastic effects on conversion and bounce rates.
Not just that, but in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), slower sites are penalised in Google’s search rankings.
Generally speaking, the faster the better.
But, as every eCommerce store owner knows, this is often easier said than done.
That’s why in this article we’re going to go over our top 10 tips for speeding up your e-commerce store and boosting those conversion rates.
10 Easy Tips for Boosting Your Ecommerce Website’s Speed
1. Invest in Good Hosting
The “bedrock” of any fast website is a good hosting service.
You need a web hosting partner that is not only fast but able to scale with the needs of your business, to avoid having the site slow to a crawl in times of peak demand.
We’ve heard good things about Xneelo (Formerly Hertzner), Bluehost and Afrihost but we highly suggest shopping around and finding the best hosting provider to meet your needs.
The bigger providers will typically have more infrastructure in place, but may not be able to meet the customer service level of a smaller hosting provider.
2. Invest in a Good CMS
If hosting is the “bedrock” of your website, the CMS (Content Management System) you use is the house built on top of it.
Now, you don’t have to use a CMS, you could develop a custom website or pay someone to develop it for you.
But, increasingly we find that there’s simply no real point. You can get almost any feature imaginable for the big CMS platforms (like Shopify and Woocommerce) and they have the big advantage of lettering even complete technophobes interact with the backend of their site in an intuitive way.
With that said, not all CMS are made equal.
It’s worth investing in a CMS that is optimised for loading speed from the start, or you’ll likely need to go in later and try to fix it.
Shopify in particular is great at coming super fast out-of-the-box, while we’ve found some WordPress themes can start chugging along when the site gets too big.
For WordPress, we recommend always making sure any theme you use is optimised for page speed out of the box.
3. Implement Caching
One of the fastest and easiest ways to speed up repeat visits to your site is to implement caching.
This is incredibly easy to do with major CMS systems where it’s a simple plugin or addon away.
Caching works by storing some of your website’s code on the visitor’s local machine when they visit for the first time.
Then, on repeat visits (until they clear their cache) the website doesn’t need to download these assets from the webserver again.
Something to watch out for with caching is that you need to manually flush your website’s cache every time you make a major change, or people might still see the old version.
4. Use a CDN (If You’re an International Store)
To briefly go over the benefits: CDNs let users always download a website’s content from a local server no matter where they are in the globe, rather than always from a fixed point.
This eliminates the latency inherent to transferring data over large geographical distances.
5. Optimise Images
Images are a big culprit for making web pages slow to load, for two reasons.
Firstly, having an image with the dimensions of a bajillion megapixels is simply unnecessary, seeing as most people visit websites on their mobile phones.
You need to optimise the size of images by compressing them or using smaller sized image formats.
Secondly, people often forget to specify the dimensions of an image, in which case it loads in at the original size.
This can look disproportionate and horrible, on top of slowing down your web page. So make sure to always constrain the dimensions of the images on your site.
6. Optimise Your Tracking
Having a million tracking codes for each platform you’re running is another potential culprit for slow site speeds.
We recommend consolidating all of your tracking into Google Tag manager, which is the best platform we’ve found thus far for managing e-commerce tracking across platforms.
7. Beware Excessive Redirects and Redirect Loops
“Sloppy” SEO practices and site migrations can lead to a lot of redirected URLs on your website.
Why is this bad? Well, when you’re redirected between a chain of URLs it can turn into a noticeable delay in the loading time.
Redirect loops are the worse version of this, where two URLs redirect back to one another in an infinite loop.
So, beware excessively using redirects to solve 404 error codes and keep an eye on your site’s URL structure to make sure there are no redirect chains going on.
8. Avoid “Plugin-Bloat”
With CMS systems, it’s all too easy to fall prey to “Plugin-Bloat”.
It’s where you install so many plugins that they begin to conflict with each other and slow down your site.
We recommend doing regular checkups on your site, to remove unused plugins and consider which you really use, if you find yourself facing this problem.
9. “Minify” Code (Javascript and CSS)
A more technical solution, but relatively easy for people with the needed skills.
Reducing the size of your code is another great way to reduce the size of a web page and therefore increase site speed.
This is a common fix for older sites with additional code “patched on” over time, that can often be simplified and condensed significantly.
Talk to your web developers if you find this is an issue with your site.
10. Remove Broken Links
Lastly, “broken” links are another culprit of slow site speed.
Usually resulting in 404 pages, when your website tries to access a 404 page it has to search through the entire server to make sure it’s not overlooking a redirect for the web page.
This results in a noticeable delay, and your reward at the end is a 404 page (if the website even has one set up).
Needless to say, this is incredibly frustrating and should be avoided.
Do regular checkups to remove broken links from your site, almost all SEO tools have functionality for this.
Conclusion
We hope this gave you some insight on the best ways to speed up your e-commerce site.
Site speed is an essential component of any site, both for SEO and the practical usability of your site.
Invest in site speed early and often and you’ll reap the rewards indirectly, through increased conversion rates and reduced bounce rates from your site.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
If you need any help running your business’ digital marketing, feel free to reach out with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for our clients.
