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Imagine this: you’ve created an amazing marketing campaign with highly converting content (think heavy animation, visuals, and interactions)–and it’s working. Your target audience loves the campaign, and your website is flooding with traffic. But all of a sudden, your website takes a hit. A tiny hit of delayed loading time by 2 seconds shouldn’t be a big deal, right?
Wrong! A seemingly minuscule delay, anywhere from 1 to 3 seconds, can drop your conversion rate by 32%. This tiny flaw, coupled with other site performance issues, can be disastrous for your eCommerce sales.
Fortunately, this article exists where we are sharing seven tried and tested ways to improve your eCommerce website performance.
Let’s start with the first tip:
#1. Choose Faster Website Hosting
Your hosting server’s size–i.e., hard drive storage, RAM, CPU speed–must meet your site’s traffic requirement. It’s a persistent issue with fast-growing eCommerce brands that continue to use smaller or shared servers.
Therefore, look out for website hosting platforms with better:
- Bandwidth and memory limits for scaling during high-traffic seasons
- Peak user load and project traffic to avoid crashing
Moreover, before any major event, like a Black Friday sale, ask the service provider to help prepare for traffic and an influx of orders.
However, since many eCommerce websites have their unique technology requirement, you can also choose to host on your own platform. But here also, pick a plan that meets all the criteria so you don’t have to deal with performance issues later.
This helps ensure that your site’s infrastructure supports more than just immediate loads but helps integrate smoothly with other elements of your digital strategy, like email marketing campaigns. Think about it: The better the site and email marketing tools communicate with each other, the easier it is to track traffic converting from email over to the website and calculate email marketing ROI.
#2. Use a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a set of servers that are dispersed around the world and meant to distribute content delivery load through servers near your visitor’s location. As more eCommerce sites go global, CDN is becoming a non-negotiable element of high-performing websites.
Along with enhanced content availability, a quality CDN helps you:
- Decrease server load by lowering bandwidth consumption
- Allow audience segmentation based on user analytics
- Improve site speed and website performance
- Reduces network latency and packet loss
- Enable advanced website security
Choosing the right CDN will drastically improve how well your site’s page load time and overall performance. Select a CDN provider for your eCommerce business with adequate network size, performance optimization, and server locations.
#3. Compress and Resize Images and Videos
Images and videos are a crucial part of overall eCommerce SEO. They improve image search traffic, engagement, and conversion and reduce bounce rate. But, they also add up to above 50%-70% of a website’s total weight.
The load adds up as your website scales with more products and content (blog posts, case studies, etc). Consider compressing, resizing, and reducing image and video files.
Use tools to downsize the image without affecting quality with lossless compression. Remove empty image sources <img src =”> from your code, as they cause the browser to send extra requests to your servers.
For videos, use a lite embed that loads content directly on your webpage. Since YouTube thumbnails are approximately 15 kilobytes, using lite embed can reduce web page size by about a megabyte.
#4. Remove Unnecessary Popups
eCommerce owners love adding popups, quick-views, and many similar features to their website–it looks great and increases visitors’ engagement. But there’s a fine line between the right elements and too many flashy graphics that drive customers away.
Other than distracting users from making the final purchase, they take a toll on your site’s speed and performance.
Therefore, set parameters around using popups. For example, create popup triggers so that extra code doesn’t add to a slower-loading website. Find the average time users spend on the side and subtract 3 seconds. Or make the popups exit-intent only.
Also, use elements like chatbots to enhance customer interaction without compromising website performance. Using a Chatbot Builder, create a low-load, AI-powered chatbot that provides instant customer support and personalized recommendations while also reducing the load on your servers.
#5. Leverage Lazy Loading
Lazy loading stops all your web page’s content from loading at the same time. Instead, it only loads the content when customers hit a certain trigger.
For example, when a user opens a product page, only vital content like image, item’s title, and product description is loaded. As they scroll down the page, other sections–customer reviews, UGC, social media carousel–load. This prevents the server from code overwhelming by uploading too much information immediately. Plus, it improves page load time.
#6. Track Key Performance Metrics
While a website page is an intuitive concept, performance cannot be just summed up by how fast the site loads. You want to focus on multiple indicators, including:
- First content paint indicates when the first texts or images are painted when visitors open your site. Aim for a score between 0.1 to 0.8 seconds for Google to consider your website as “fast.”
- Largest content paint is a measure of when the page’s most significant content loads. A score of 2.5 seconds or less is ideal for best performance.
- Time of the first byte (TTFB): Slow TTFB indicates issues with your web server that can be fixed by changing the server plan or using a CDN.
- Time to interaction: This measures when users request your website and when they first interact with elements, like clicking a link or scrolling. Google recommends a TTI score between 0-3.8 seconds.
Using Google Lighthouse, you can get your site scores based on Google’s ratings of accessibility, SEO, and performance. Plus, it will help you understand the customer experience of your website, thus highlighting the areas of improvement.
Beyond these metrics, user experience also helps you dive into key site performance issues. Thus, leverage tools like Usersnap to place users at the center of your website development. Through it, you can capture, organize, and respond to all user feedback, ensuring that your site not only performs well but is also highly converting and ultimately drives better sales.
#7. Optimize Team Collaboration
No matter how good your efforts are, if your team cannot collaborate smoothly, the website performance improvement strategies will not take place efficiently. That’s why you should optimize your team collaboration. Make sure their interpersonal communication is optimal, and that the flow of knowledge and information runs smoothly. This avoids misunderstandings, misconceptions, delays and an overall bad work environment.
You can use tools like communication channels, project management software, and shared dashboards.
Set clear goals and KPIs related to website performance and sales. Organize cross-functional team-building activities that bring different departments to learn from each other and foster collaboration.
Never Stop Experimenting
In the eCommerce space, website performance is more than a luxury–it’s the currency of conversion and sales. Equipped with the above seven expert strategies, you are ready to give your users the best online shopping experience.
But it’s just a start. As your business grows, you’ll face new performance issues. The key is to keep experimenting, A/B tests different tactics, and stay on top of performance-improving tech, and your eCommerce sales will soon start shooting through the roof.
