Optimizing Your Ecommerce Website for Faster Loading (and Why You Should)

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Our society has a serious need for speed, especially when it comes to shopping. A second or two in the grand scheme of things isn’t a lot of time, but a second or two when it comes to loading an ecommerce site can make or break conversion rates. The longer your store takes to load, the more people will simply leave rather than wait (and likely head down the “highway” to a competitor).

Here are some helpful tips for optimizing your ecommerce site for faster loading — and a closer look at why you should.



The faster, the better
Online stores have a limited amount of time to entice czech republic number dataset to buy. Two out of three mobile shoppers expect page load times of four seconds or less. A one-second delay can result in a seven percent reduction in conversion rates. And of course, there’s a lasting impact: if a shopper remembers being unhappy with your site once, they may avoid it in the future, thus invalidating all of your future projects and marketing efforts .

Compress Photos
Full-size photos could be one reason your site is lagging. Make sure you’re optimizing all of your images and videos for the web . Many photo editing tools, like Photoshop, offer a “Save for Web” option, and there are a number of image compression tools available online to help you out. You’ll also want to save your images in JPG format at the lowest acceptable quality before they become visibly noticeable—obviously, you still want your site to look high-quality when it loads. As GitHub writes, “For an average JPEG, there’s a much smaller, mostly negligible, change in apparent quality from 100-75, but a significant file size difference for each step down.”

Mobile-friendly platform
E -commerce is constantly trending toward mobile. Meanwhile, 47.3 percent of small and medium-sized business websites in the U.S. are not mobile-ready. Even if your site loads instantly on desktop, neglecting mobile load times will alienate shoppers using their smartphones or tablets. A mobile cloud e-commerce store is a must these days. You want to consider what media formats your site uses—for example, Flash is notoriously difficult for mobile browsers to render.



Look at your font choice
Even factors as simple as font choice can affect load times . Using web fonts is beneficial in keeping your brand and store look consistent across devices and browsers, but it can be a disadvantage in terms of load speed. Consider your font choices carefully and run tests to see how they affect your load speed before committing.