For business owners, ensuring that your website loads quickly can mean the difference between gaining a loyal customer and losing a potential sale.
With so many options available, today’s online shoppers won’t wait around for slow pages. They expect instant gratification, and if your site doesn’t deliver, they’ll move on to one that does.
This leads us to a pressing question: how to make web pages load faster?
In this blog post, we’ll zip through the need for speed on your website, show you how to check its loading time, uncover what slows it down, and reveal turbo-charged steps to rev it up! So, read on to learn how to improve page load speed.
Why Is Site Speed Important?
Have you ever clicked on a website only to find yourself waiting for what feels like an eternity for the page to load? Frustrating, isn’t it? Now, imagine this scenario happening to your potential customers.
Your customers expect speed, and not meeting this expectation can severely impact your bottom line.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that site speed significantly affects conversion rates and sales.
For instance, an analysis by Potent of over 27,000 pages compared site speed with conversion rates for B2C ecommerce websites. Results showed that a site loading in 1 second boasts a conversion rate 2.5 times higher than one taking 5 seconds to load.
Similarly, for B2B websites, a site that loads in 1 second achieves a conversion rate 3 times higher than a site with a 5-second load time. That means a delay of even one second can cause a significant drop in potential revenue.
Page load time directly affects user experience. When a site takes too long to load, users become impatient and are likely to “bounce”—meaning they leave your site almost immediately. This not only results in lost sales but also negatively impacts your site’s search engine ranking.
Google uses page load time as one of the factors in its algorithm, meaning faster sites are more likely to appear higher in search results. So, ecommerce website speed optimization not only affects your sales but also boosts your online visibility.
Loading is a key component of Core Web Vitals, the metrics Google uses to rank web pages in search results (Source: Google)
What Page Loading Time Depends On
Understanding what affects your website’s loading time is the first step toward improving it. Several factors influence how quickly a page loads, including network and server time, and browser time.
Network and server time depends on the speed of the internet connection and how quickly static assets like images and files are served.
Browser time is the duration it takes for the browser to parse, execute, and render the page, or in simple terms, how quickly the browser can understand and display your site’s content.
Different browsers, platforms, and even geographical locations can result in varying load times for the same web page. For example, users accessing your site from a mobile device may experience different speeds compared to those using a desktop.
Similarly, if your website is hosted on servers located in the US, international users may face longer load times.
Other factors affecting the ecommerce site speed include:
High-resolution images and videos. They generally tend to be larger files and can slow down page load speeds Third-party apps, plugins, and customizations. Live chats, pop-ups, and other customizations might take a little time to process, depending on the information they’re pulling from services, which can affect page load speed Website themes/templates. If a site theme has a lot of messy or extraneous code, it can slow down your page loading times High website traffic. A large number of visitors on your ecommerce website at one time affects the server response time.
How to Check Site Speed
Before improving your website’s speed, you need to know where it stands. Several online tools can help you run a website speed test and identify areas for improvement.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom offer detailed reports on your site’s performance, highlighting critical metrics like loading time, page size, and the number of requests.
The Performance Score on your GTmetrix report shows how well your page performs from a user’s point of view, including how fast it loads
To use these tools, simply enter your website’s URL and run a test. The results will provide insights into your site’s current speed and offer recommendations for optimization.
Regularly checking your site’s speed ensures you stay on top of any issues that may arise and allows you to make continuous improvements.
What Is a Good Page Load Time?
Before delving into ecommerce website optimization, you might ask, what defines an ideal page load time?
To answer that question, let’s talk about Core Web Vitals. This is a set of metrics Google uses to measure important web performance aspects.
One of the Core Web Vitals is Largest Contentful Paint, which measures a page’s loading performance. Google suggests aiming for the LCP within 2.5 seconds.
However, the faster, the better. The best practice is to aim for page load times of under two seconds. Achieving this benchmark can significantly enhance user experience and improve your site’s search engine ranking.
Remember, even small improvements can have a big impact. Shaving just a second off your page load time can lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer satisfaction. The goal is to create a seamless, fast-loading experience that engages users. This approach eliminates future concerns about how to increase site speed.
How to Improve Site Speed
Now that you understand the importance of website speed and how to check it let’s explore practical steps you can take to improve it.
Here are some effective techniques for website speed optimization:
Do Your Research When Choosing a Platform
With the right platform, you likely won’t have to stress about how to speed up web page loading times.
When choosing a site builder or an ecommerce platform for your business, make sure to consider their performance capabilities. Look for reviews and information on their website loading speeds to ensure you’re selecting the best option for your business.
For example, at Ecwid by Lightspeed, we host online stores on swift, globally distributed servers without bandwidth limitations. Plus, we consistently enhance our code and infrastructure, which contributes to faster server response (to recap, this refers to how quickly the server relays information.)
The same applies to site themes or templates. Ecwid’s Instant site templates come ready to go with a streamlined framework. If you’re hosting your site on another platform like WordPress or Wix, be sure to pick an optimized theme.
Ecwid Instant site templates are optimized for fast shopping experience for your customers
Optimize Images
Large image files are one of the main culprits of slow page load times.
Optimize your images by compressing them without sacrificing quality:
Use formats like JPEG for photos and PNG for graphics with transparent backgrounds. Tools like TinyPNG and ImageOptim can help you compress images effortlessly.
By the way, Ecwid automatically compresses your product images, so your store loads quickly and looks great on both desktop and mobile. Just make sure you’re using lightweight pictures for your website theme.
Optimize Products Layout
Instead of displaying all your products on the main page, consider showing fewer products on the storefront to help improve site speed.
Collapsing categories and showing fewer products on the storefront page can help speed up content downloads from your hosting server. Here’s how to do that in Ecwid.
Limit the Number of Third-Party Apps
You might’ve installed some third-party plugins or add-ons on your website, such as pop-ups or live chats. While these apps can enhance your website’s functionality and user experience, they can also slow down your site if not optimized properly.
Make sure to only use essential third-party apps and limit the number of add-ons on your website. Regularly review which ones are necessary and remove any that aren’t adding value to your business.
Minimize Redirects
A redirect happens when you try to visit a webpage, but you end up being sent to a different page instead. Redirects can add a tiny bit of time—or sometimes even a few seconds—to how long it takes for a page to load.
Redirects are sometimes unavoidable, for example, when you need to forward visitors from discontinued products to new ones. But watch out, redirects can get overused, especially on bigger sites with different people managing them, and can pile up over time.
As a site owner, set up clear guidelines on using redirects and regularly check your key pages for any unnecessary ones. And if you need to create a redirect for your Ecwid Instant Site, here’s how to do that.
If you’ve tried all the above but are still wondering how to optimize website speed, you might need a developer’s help. While the tips mentioned earlier are simple enough to implement, even for less tech-savvy, more advanced methods exist to enhance your site’s speed.
Use Browser Caching
Browser caching stores static files on a user’s device, so they don’t have to be reloaded each time the user visits your site. This can drastically reduce load times for returning visitors.
Ask your developer to configure your server to set an expiration date for cached resources, ensuring that users have the latest version of your site without unnecessary delays. Developers can also instruct browsers to cache elements of a webpage that will not change often.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A CDN, or a content delivery network, distributes your site’s static assets across multiple data centers worldwide. When a user accesses your site, the CDN serves the assets from the nearest data center, reducing load times. Popular CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, Gcore, and Amazon CloudFront.
Using CDN makes sense for businesses with a global audience since it can significantly reduce load times for international visitors.
Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is a framework designed to make mobile pages load faster. With AMP, you can significantly improve the load times of your mobile pages, enhancing the user experience for mobile visitors.
Minimize HTTP Requests
Most webpages need browsers to make several HTTP requests for different assets like images, scripts, and CSS files. In fact, some pages require dozens of these requests. Each one means a round trip to and from the server hosting the resource, which can slow down the overall load time for a webpage.
Due to these potential issues, it’s best to keep the number of assets each page needs to load to a minimum. Running a speed test can help you spot which HTTP requests are slowing things down the most.
Wrap Up
In today’s fast-paced digital world, website speed is not just a luxury — it’s a necessity. For small business owners, ensuring that your website loads quickly can make a significant difference in attracting and retaining customers.
Explore the factors that affect website speed, regularly check your site’s performance, and implement website performance optimization techniques to create a fast experience that keeps users engaged.
Remember, every second counts. Take the steps today to optimize your website’s speed and set your business up for success. One of the first steps you can take is choosing Ecwid for your online store, as it’s optimized to help you create a fast and efficient shopping experience for your customers.
The post Speed Matters: How to Improve Website Loading Time first appeared on Ecwid | E-Commerce Shopping Cart.
