eCommerce: 7 tips to optimize its performance

A massive increase in traffic or an unexpected increase in transactions can affect the performance of your eCommerce site.

Page load time, in addition to affecting search engine rankings, is a major factor in user experience. In this sense, if you tend to underestimate the optimization of your website, the possibility of facing a loss of potential customers will increase.

Content Index:
How eCommerce speed affects sales
Tips for improving the speed of your eCommerce
Rely on a quality infrastructure
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Optimize your media assets
Choose a responsive theme and the necessary plugins
Responsive website
Reduce redirects and control broken links
Use pop-ups in moderation
Test the loading speed of your eCommerce
How eCommerce speed affects sales
According to Stats, 40% of users tend to abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This figure highlights the absolute centrality that user experience receives from a strategic perspective.

These days, competition is fierce and it is crucial to work on multiple fronts to try to stand out from the crowd. A high-performing eCommerce that assumes the ideal features to ensure fast loading, an intuitive interface, and an efficient customer journey will enable increased conversion rates and generate more leads.

Conversely, value that falls short of user expectations will not only affect sales, but will also in most cases undermine a company’s overall reputation as a result of a disappointing shopping experience.

Tips for improving the speed of your eCommerce
Have you tested your eCommerce speed with a tool, but believe it can be improved or do you plan to bring your business online? Below we gather some useful tips for optimizing your website’s performance.

Rely on a quality infrastructure
The infrastructure that will host your eCommerce will affect its performance. The first step in choosing an efficient serviceis given by the type of online store you want to implement, considering at this stage the amount of products that will have to be included and the traffic you expect to handle.

For less complex projects, a hosting service may be sufficient. In this sense, Shellrent’s offer is developed around four plans compatible with the most widely used CMSs on the market. In the application area, we have structured ad hoc solutions that include the ideal resources and features for creating an online store with WooCommerce, PhotoShop and Magento.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
CDNs enable eCommerce to quickly deliver content regardless of bandwidth or geographical location of the user, making page loading faster because it is pre-saved (cached) in datacenters located around the world. Without this distribution network, loading times would be significantly longer for those located a long distance from the servers.

In addition to this, CDNs are able to handle significant spikes in web traffic, as the user will view content stored on the nearest server in a way that quickly gets the required information, and they act as a filter by blocking the actions of malicious parties that could compromise the operation of the website.

Shellrent, thanks to its partnership with Cloudflare, offers the ability to manage DNS records by activating the appropriate function with a single click from the Manager Control Panel.

Optimize media resources
An important part of optimizing your eCommerce is making sure that content such as images and videos do not overload the website, compromising its loading. The goal is to create high-quality images with the lowest file size.

Here are some best practices you can also follow to avoid affecting visual quality:

• Resize images correctly, trying to keep the file size under 70-80 KB. Each platform has different tips for reducing images, so it is important to check what the ideal size is depending on the CMS used;
• compress images without losing quality, using one of two types of compression as appropriate: lossy vs lossless;
• choose the appropriate format;
• implement slow loading, which is an optimization technique that can be applied, for example, for images that are placed in the footer: these, in essence, will load only when the visitor scrolls down.
• Use caching, relying on the tools that CMSs make available. With the WordPress WP Rocket plugin, for example, you can store files in the browser cache or on a proxy server for faster access. This applies to images, as well as any other content that the visitor requests a second time.

Choosing a responsive theme and the necessary plugins
An easy way to improve the speed of your eCommerce is to choose a responsive look. All platforms offer hundreds of different themes consisting of JavaScript, CSS, HTML and other various codes. As you modify your theme and customize your website, code will be added that, if not properly optimized, will negatively affect the page loading speed.

At the same time, installing several plugins may also result in slowing down pages. The advice, in this case, is to choose only those tools that are strictly necessary and useful.

Responsive website
Most users make purchases from smartphones, and the user experience starts with navigation. Without a responsive design, the likelihood of losing a chunk of potential customers is high: make sure, therefore, that your eCommerce is properly viewable from any type of device.

Reduce redirects and control broken links
Every time a page redirects to another page, users have to wait for the http request/response cycle to complete, which, in addition to being unnecessary, has a negative impact on the speed of your website. To avoid this, minimize the number of redirects on the web page and include only those that are necessary. Try to use 301 server-side redirects as they are also important for SEO.

Broken links increase HTTP requests and stifle website speed. To quickly identify and remove them, you can use a tool such as Broken Link Checker. This tool will highlight the exact location of obsolete hyperlinks in your code, making cleanup quick. The 404 error is not only annoying, but can also result in penalties from a search engine ranking perspective.

Use pop-ups in moderation
Providing a quick pop-up display window should save users time and help them make purchasing decisions faster. However, pop-ups can preload information for an entire page and result in slow loading or frustration from a wrong click.

Test your eCommerce’s loading speed.
Online you can track several tools for measuring your website’s performance. Many of these not only offer an overview of web page loading speed, but also provide useful tips for taking action and resolving the snags that cause your eCommerce to slow down.

As pointed out earlier, the hosting that hosts your offering also affects the performance of your website. In this sense, choosing the service you rely on appears crucial.