This article aims at illustrating the pertinent ways to accelerate the speed of eCommerce sites so that customers need not have to wait longer for each page to load.
Apparently, for every second a visitor has to wait for an eCommerce website to load, it reduces the conversion rate by a certain percentage. Apart from that, there’s reduction in the number of pageviews and substantial fall in the customer satisfaction. While these indicate that online customers are seemingly the most impatient ones, good speed and optimised performance are key to the eCommerce successes. So, what eCommerce merchants using Magento development or any eCart solutions need to do to help their websites load faster? Following is a quick list of the very few easiest but efficient tricks to boost the eCommerce site’s speed so that they did not lose out any of their potential customers.
Enabling browser caching
When anyone visits a site for the first time, it comparatively takes more time as the browser has to download its all data in the cache. However, by enabling the caching system from the eCart system settings, the browser can be entitled to store the resources previously downloaded on a local area. This streamline the loading speed as the amount of data transferred over the network reduces considerably.
Product image optimisation
Apparently, banners and high-quality images of every product clicked by professional photographers are the soul of every eCommerce site. But, they take up a lot of bytes or megabytes on the sites which wastes of time for the system browsers to load. This evidently results in slower loading of the product pages. It is thus wiser to reduce the file size by resizing the images using tools for Photo editing like Adobe Photoshop.
Choosing a fitting CDN
CDN, acronym for Content delivery network refers to the interconnection between the different distributed servers which are responsible for delivering the web pages and their content to the website visitors. While it depends on the geographical proximity of the website user with the page origin, its leads to super fast loading of the web pages when clicked. Thus, eCommerce businesses are asked to opt for a fitting CDN considering the coverage range and features provided by it.
Deploying of flat catalogue
One effective solution to the problem of slower loading speed is to enable the option of flat catalogue or products. Because, in doing so, eCommerce owners can deliberately reduce their size of the database required to show up the products. Easily applicable for the Magento powered sites, this is results in reducing the complexities of MySQL query and improvements in the site speed.
For sure, a faster and optimised eCommerce sites can get higher conversions than slowly processing sites. With so many alternative websites for shopping, it’s hard to keep customers hooked to a particular site. Thus, it is crucial to stick to the above smart tips to enhance site’s speed and boost conversions.
Jonathan Paul is a certified Magento developer, associated with PHPProgrammers, an eminent web development company in Australia for more than 5 years and devoted himself to lots of eCommerce projects.