Can Page Load Speed Help Your E-Commerce Website?

By | 2 August 2016
2 Minute Read

Can Page Load Speed Help Your E-Commerce Website?

If the question is “can page load speed help your e-commerce website?” then the answer is “yes, absolutely.” Consider this – if you are looking to buy a product would you want to wait around on a website that is clunky and takes forever to load to buy that product – when you could buy a similar product somewhere else much faster? Time is money, after all!

Page load speed does actually make a difference in your ecommerce sales, so make sure that your website loads as quickly as possible. Also, Google penalises websites that offer a poor user experience – so your slow website might also start sliding down in the Google rankings.

According to some accounts even a one second delay in loading speed will have an impact in your revenue. Ideally your page should load within three seconds or less, or it will feel very slow to the average web browser.

So, what can you do to increase the speed of your ecommerce site? Here are some tips for making sure that your ecommerce website loads as quickly as possible:

  • Reduce the size of the page. You can do this by avoiding embedding large images or big objects such as Javascript on a page if possible.
  • Of course, you will need to find a balance here between load times and rich graphics because beautiful images help to sell your products.
  • Use in-memory technology and caching so that you will not need to access your database unnecessarily.
  • Get some data compression software to compress the data your website sends to the browser.
  • Specify the weight and height of images so that the browser can create placeholders for the images and load both the page and the images at the same time – which saves valuable seconds.
  • Make sure that you are optimising the configuration of your ecommerce platform in order to improve load times. There are usually a few minor tweaks that you can do on most platforms which will offer you significant gains.
  • You can use a tool to measure your site’s speed, such as Google PageSpeed Insight or Pingdom. Check on it now and then to make sure it is still loading fast.

Keep these tips in mind so that slow page load speed doesn’t slow down the success of your ecommerce website.