5 Ways To Speed Up Your E-Commerce Store by Jason Hall. Available from <http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/5-ways-to-speed-up-your-e-commerce-store/> [May 23, 2017]
We live in an era where technological advancements are occurring at a rapid rate, and one of the most noticeable changes is the speed of the internet, which continues to incline in correlation with the number of users across the planet. As an eCommerce retailer, ensuring your website is fast isn’t a foregone conclusion, where many vendors face a combination of problems that lead to difficulties in developing a site which will run quickly.
This is troubling when you consider users are considerably less likely to shop at your store if your website takes a long time to load, regardless of how fantastic and user-friendly it is. Since even a one second delay can impact your business’ revenue, increasing the speed of your eCommerce site is a vital consideration which deserves due care and attention, and by capitalising on the advice offered below, you’ll be more likely to convert potential buyers to sales, and consequently generate income at a faster rate.
1. Use Caching & In-Memory Technology
By utilising caching and in-memory technologies, you can store crucial information such as your product catalogue, search indexes, and customer information without calls on your database. This means you won’t have to access your database unnecessarily, allowing a utilisation of the RAM available on a given server which has the capacity to store data. This improves performance dramatically since input-output operations are generally up to ten times faster on RAM than on hard disk.
2. Content Delivery Network
If you are a beginner developing your first eCommerce store, it is important to find a dedicated host which effectively acts as a bespoke server machine for your website. One of my personal favourites is JavaPipe, which is widely considered as a highly effective web host in a competitive landscape with out-of-the-box CloudFlare CDN support. Using a content delivery network has several advantages if you have a consumer base all around the world, and this is even more potent if you are aware of the geographical location of your target audience. Using a content delivery network means you can reduce loading times by caching content on servers in different regions across the globe, helping, for example, a customer in Beijing who can load a page from a server in China.
3. Reduce Page Size
There are various elements on each page which determine the size of your page, including JavaScript, CSS, and images. If you can avoid embedding big objects or images on your page, this is highly recommended and will boost loading times dramatically. You can monitor the loading time of your page by saving it as an archive folder on your computer, thus allowing you to easily measure size. It is important to find the right balance between incorporating rich graphics and maintaining quick speeds, with a view to keeping page loading times at three seconds or less.
4. Test For Mobile
Research suggests that over half of web traffic is directed through mobile devices, stressing the importance of tailoring your website so that mobile users experience a fast and reliable service. If your website isn’t mobile optimised, you are at risk of failing to show up in mobile search results on Google, which will dramatically impact your business. Since phones have less processing power than computers, and will consequently fail to render complex pages, it is mandatory to work in collaboration with your development team and ensure pages are quick and fully functional on mobile devices.
5. Utilise Efficient Coding
Coding experts can minimise the number of HTTP requests each page makes, which can efficiently improve the loading time of pages on your eCommerce store. This is achieved by storing frequently used files locally so they don’t need to be reloaded on every page, alongside more advanced programming techniques such as configuring server-side page caching and splitting content by loading via AJAX.
I hope you have found these tips for speeding up your e-commerce store useful, and if you have any other recommendations that you feel as if we’ve left out, be sure to comment below to get the discussion going!
5 Ways To Speed Up Your E-Commerce Store by Jason Hall. Available from <http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/5-ways-to-speed-up-your-e-commerce-store/> [May 23, 2017]