How to Speed Up Your Website and Increase Your Sales and Conversions
Wednesday, June 29, 2016Lauren Macdonald
How to Speed Up Your Website and Boost Your eCommerce Sales and Conversions
According to
KissMetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, and a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. This means that if an eCommerce website is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
Don’t miss out on potential sales and revenue because of a slow site! Here’s our top 4 suggestions for boosting your eCommerce website’s speed:
Reduce Page Size
When it comes to improving your website speed, the smaller the page size, the better! Build your website pages with loading times in mind, and try to keep page load times to 3 seconds or less. One way to keep page size down is to avoid embedding big objects or images on a page.
Optimize Images
Size and format are important things to focus on when it comes to images on your eCommerce website. Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important to keep your images as small as possible. It’s also a smart idea to reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level, and save images in JPEG, or PNG format whenever possible. Only use GIFs for small or simple graphics, and avoid saving images in BMP or TIFF formats.
One other thing that many website owners are unaware of is the importance of specifying image dimensions. Retailers often create an image without specifying the dimensions, which forces the browser to load the image entirely before it can start another task, which takes more time. By specifying the height and width for images, the browser can create placeholders and load the page and images simultaneously.
Utilize Browser Caching
When you visit a website, the elements of the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage, so that the next time you visit the website your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server. Enabling this feature on your eCommerce website can drastically increase page load speed for your returning visitors.
Host Your Website on the Right Server
When building your website and deciding where to host it, do your research! Some servers will be better than others depending on the unique design of your website, the content you will be sharing on it, and the amount of traffic you predict having.
Take a look at our previous blog on the
different types of website hosting accounts and be sure to keep in mind server response time when making your selection. You should also use a tool such as
Google’s PageSpeed Insights in order to see how well your website is performing and areas where you can reduce server response time and increase overall speed.