If you are running an e-commerce business, you would naturally have a website dedicated to your wares and offerings. We all know that e-commerce businesses can be particularly lucrative these days, especially with the increased popularity of online shopping. More people are shopping online, and whilst you may already be aware of this, it’s time to take full advantage of this change.
But if your website isn’t up to speed, you could very well lose a significant portion of your would-be clients. Clients and visitors expect a website page to load in as little as two seconds, and it can be a definite challenge indeed if your website loads too slowly. If you want to have a faster-loading website to retain your customers and, more importantly, to boost your sales, here are the top things you can do.
- Make use of adaptive images
One of the first things you can do to make your website load faster is to use adaptive images. What does this mean? It means using various tools like Adaptive Images or Picturefill to save your website’s bandwidth and improve and enhance its pages’ speed. Making this change makes sense because up to 61% of the ‘page weight’ of a website on a computer is made up of images. If you want, you can also use new formats for images, such as JPeg XR and WebP. When you do this, you can decrease the weight of images by as much as 20 to 50% – and you don’t even have to sacrifice the quality of the photos, either.
If you want to have a faster website, here’s another thing you can do, according to Expre Digital Ltd: assess your plugins. It’s all too true that plugins are helpful when it comes to bringing new features and functionality to your site, but if you have too many plugins on your site, it will take much longer for your site to load. Conversely, outdated or poor plugins are the enemy of any website because they can significantly slow down your site’s performance. The solution to this problem is pretty simple; however – remove plugins that are no longer useful, outdated, or duplicate your site’s functionality.
- Don’t forget the importance of caching
Caching your browser can store the cache site versions of static resources, which can tremendously quicken the speed of your site pages and reduce lag in your servers. When someone visits any of your site pages, the cached page version will be displayed unless you had changed it from when you last cached it. With this, your browser can save a majority of the requests to your site server and enhance your site’s loading speed as well.
- Compress your site content
One other thing you can do to enhance your site’s speed is to compress your site content. You can do this to improve the performance of your website, and popular servers like IIS and Apache make use of GZIP algorithm, which is done automatically on JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. You can also utilise online compressor platforms or services to eliminate unnecessary characters and spaces on your CSS and HTML code.
