The right way to Improve Website Loading Time

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 web shoppers won’t wait around for slow pages. They expect easy gratification, and if your site doesn’t deliver, they’ll move on to one which does.

​​This leads us to a pressing query: the right way to make web pages load faster?

In this blog post, we’ll zip through the need for speed on your website, show you the right way to check its loading time, uncover what slows it down, and reveal turbo-charged steps to rev it up! So, read on to learn the right way to improve page load speed.

Why Is Site Speed Necessary?

Have you ever ever clicked on a website only to end up waiting for what appears 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.

Quite a few studies have demonstrated that site speed significantly affects conversion rates and sales.

For example, an evaluation by Potent of over 27,000 pages compared site speed with conversion rates for B2C ecommerce web sites. 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 web sites, a site that loads in 1 second achieves a conversion rate 3 times higher than a site with a 5-second load time. Meaning a delay of even one second could cause a significant drop in potential revenue.

Page load time directly affects user experience. When a site takes too long to load, users grow to be impatient and are prone to “bounce”—meaning they leave your site almost immediately. This not only ends in lost sales but in addition negatively impacts your site’s search engine rating.

Google uses page load time as considered one of the aspects in its algorithm, meaning faster sites usually tend to appear higher in search results. So, ecommerce website speed optimization not only affects your sales but in addition boosts your online visibility.

What Page Loading Time Depends On

Understanding what affects your website’s loading time is the first step toward improving it. Several aspects influence how quickly a page loads, including network and server time, and browser time.

Network and server time will depend on the speed of the web 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 easy terms, how quickly the browser can understand and display your site’s content.

Different browsers, platforms, and even geographical locations can lead to various load times for the same web page. For instance, users accessing your site from a mobile device may experience different speeds in comparison with those using a desktop.

Similarly, if your website is hosted on servers positioned in the US, international users may face longer load times.

Other aspects affecting the ecommerce site speed include:

• High-resolution images and videos. They have a tendency to be larger files and can decelerate 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 may affect page load speed
• Website themes/templates. If a site theme has a lot of messy or extraneous code, it can decelerate your page loading times
• High website traffic. A large variety of visitors on your ecommerce website at one time affects the server response time.

The right way to Check Site Speed

Before improving your website’s speed, it’s worthwhile to know where it stands. Several online tools can enable you to run a website speed test and discover 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 variety of requests.

The Performance Rating on your GTmetrix report shows how well your page performs from a user’s point of view, including how briskly it loads

To use these tools, simply enter your website’s URL and run a test. The outcomes will provide insights into your site’s current speed and offer recommendations for optimization.

Commonly checking your site’s speed ensures you stay on top of any issues which will arise and lets you make continuous improvements.

What Is a Good Page Load Time?

Before delving into ecommerce website optimization, you may ask, what defines an ideal page load time?

To answer that query, let’s speak about Core Web Vitals. That is a set of metrics Google uses to measure necessary web performance points.

One in every of the Core Web Vitals is Largest Contentful Paint, which measures a page’s loading performance. Google suggests aiming for the LCP inside 2.5 seconds.

Nevertheless, the faster, the higher. The most effective 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 rating.

Remember, even small improvements can have a big impact. Shaving only a second off your page load time can result in 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 the right way to increase site speed.

The right way to Improve Site Speed

Now that you just understand the importance of website speed and the right way to check it let’s explore practical steps you’ll be able to take to improve it.

Listed below are some effective techniques for website speed optimization:

Do Your Research When Selecting a Platform

With the right platform, you likely won’t must stress about the right way to speed up web page loading times.

When selecting a site builder or an ecommerce platform for your small business, make certain to consider their performance capabilities. Search for reviews and information on their website loading speeds to make sure you’re choosing the best choice for your small business.

For instance, 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 identical applies to site themes or templates. Ecwid’s Easy site templates come able to go with a streamlined framework. If you’re hosting your site on one other platform like WordPress or Wix, be sure to pick an optimized theme.

Ecwid Easy site templates are optimized for fast shopping experience for your customers

Optimize Images

Large image files are considered one of the most important 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 enable you to compress images effortlessly.

The right way to Optimize Product Images: Instructions & Resources
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By the way, Ecwid mechanically compresses your product images, so your store loads quickly and looks great on each desktop and mobile. Just make certain you’re using lightweight pictures for your website theme.

Optimize Products Layout

As a substitute of displaying all of your products on the most important page, consider showing fewer products on the storefront to help improve site speed.

Collapsing categories and showing fewer products on the storefront page might help speed up content downloads out of your hosting server. Here’s the right way to do that in Ecwid.

Limit the Variety of Third-Party Apps

You may’ve installed some third-party plugins or add-ons on your website, reminiscent of pop-ups or live chats. While these apps can enhance your website’s functionality and user experience, they may decelerate your site if not optimized properly.

Ensure to only use essential third-party apps and limit the variety of add-ons on your website. Commonly review which of them are mandatory and remove any that aren’t adding value to your small business.

Minimize Redirects

A redirect happens whenever you attempt to visit a webpage, but you find yourself being sent to a different page as a substitute. Redirects can add a tiny little 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 it’s worthwhile to forward visitors from discontinued products to recent ones. But be careful, redirects can get overused, especially on greater sites with different people managing them, and can pile up over time.

As a site owner, arrange clear guidelines on using redirects and usually check your key pages for any unnecessary ones. And if it’s worthwhile to create a redirect for your Ecwid Easy Site, here’s the right way to do that.

If you’ve tried all of the above but are still wondering the right way to optimize website speed, you may need a developer’s help. While the suggestions mentioned earlier are easy 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 must be reloaded every time the user visits your site. This will 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 may instruct browsers to cache elements of a webpage that is not going to 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 is smart for businesses with a global audience because 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’ll be able to 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 means a round trip to and from the server hosting the resource, which may decelerate the overall load time for a webpage.

Because of these potential issues, it’s best to keep the variety of assets each page must load to a minimum. Running a speed test can enable you to spot which HTTP requests are slowing things down the most.

Wrap Up

In today’s fast-paced digital world, website speed is not only a luxury — it’s a necessity. For small business owners, ensuring that your website loads quickly could make a significant difference in attracting and retaining customers.

Explore the aspects that affect website speed, usually 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 small business up for success. One in every of the first steps you’ll be able to take is selecting Ecwid for your online store, as it’s optimized to enable you to create a fast and efficient shopping experience for your customers.