Ecommerce websites have indeed made shopping a possibility ‘wherever and whenever’. Online websites allow the users to easily compare products across platforms and also do a price comparisons.
Widening the audience base for the brand, eCommerce websites have become the most preferred and commonly opted tool for online marketing. Brand recognition increased sales, customer ease all are associated with the increased use of eCommerce websites by different industries.
What happens when your website speed is slow
Website features matter a lot to both businesses as well as customers. Websites witness major proportions of first-time visitors turning back if the website takes more than 2–3 seconds to load, in contrast to other websites that load faster and display their pages/products speedily.
Slow-moving and uploading websites greatly impact the eCommerce business’s searchability. Google AdWords Quality Score is another indicator that worsens with slow websites. This also implies a higher cost-per-click. The ranking of eCommerce websites degrades with a slower website.
The rising importance of high website speed
The relevance of website speed has become more important than ever since 2017 when the overall SERP rankings were based on the speed of mobile versions of web pages. In order to stay ahead of the competitors, businesses must focus on their website performance parameters. Utilizing the commonly accepted benchmarks for search is necessary for the digital success of the brand.
Google’s PageSpeed is the most common tool used for analyzing website speed. The displayed google scorecard should ideally show a score of 85 and above.
At times, despite user-friendly interfaces that can instantly attract the attention of visitors, if the web page takes too long to load, the purpose gets dissolved.
What causes slow website speed
A myriad of causes is associated with slow website speeds. In order to attract a greater number of visitors to the eCommerce website, businesses and brands make extensive use of images, videos, and animations which negatively impact the website speed. In addition, plug-ins and extensions are also used to provide a better, enhanced experience to the users.
Too many HTML and CSS images, scripts, files, and media can make the web page heavier, implying a greater load time. In fact, statistics indicate that two-thirds of the ‘weight’ associated with an average retail web page is owed to its graphic elements. These include logos, favicons, product or service images, etc. Location of the website visitor from the website hosting site also causes websites to load at different times across different devices.
Story so far
The highly competitive, fast-changing online world requires continuous up-gradation and digital transformations. Businesses must ensure high website speed to retain visitors, convert first-time visitors into customers and record higher sales. Factors that cause a slower, low performing website must be rectified at the earliest to avoid missing out on visitors.
Scrutinize your website from time to time. A website audit is a must to keep customer growth in check.
Here’s why?
1. Slow websites imply lost sales for your business
2. Lower conversions (visitors into customers)
3. Slow loading times hampers your brand
4. Poorly performing websites negatively impact direct traffic
5. Low search engine rankings follow your poor website speed
What can be done to improve website speed
Website speed can degrade your brand’s usability, visibility, and conversion rate. Across digital platforms, first impressions of your business’s online presence actually matter. Websites not loading can make visitors bounce away from the website.
Keep in mind the below-mentioned tips and tricks to maintain your website speed:
- Assess your website and look out for the causes of slow website loading
- Use reliable and trustworthy hosting
- Monitor your site speed
- Control your web page size
- Unused fonts, scripts, and plugins to be removed
- Merge files to reduce server requests
- Use compression software to reduce the data
- Make efficient use of content delivery networks
- Check your Time to First Byte (TTFB) (ideally 200 mms)
- Utilize catching and in-memory techniques
- Reduce HTTP requests and round trips
- Inspect the third party extensions
- Closely monitor website redirects
- Small images and buttons to be combined into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Fetch your domain a better hosting
- Try to save your images in the .jpeg files format rather than the .png format
Take away points
Maintaining a user-friendly interface with highly creative and engaging websites in addition to ensuring a high website speed is a must. Website content is another major factor that can significantly determine the actual success of your eCommerce website. Website response is integral to online business growth.
As is clear, testing and assessing your current website speed, analyzing the critical factors responsible for its slow loading speed, and putting in place factors that can rectify the website speed matters a lot in the modern, highly competitive digitally active business world.
How Indsoft can help
Indsoft provides excellence-driven, customer-centric, and competitive online services. Holding a specialty in website hosting services, the company offers expert-led support for niche website services. With rich industry expertise led by our professional team of web designers, developers, SEO specialists, and other tech-related experts, IndSoft has been rated a 4.5-star category.
Head straight to the industry leader — IndSoft for availing niche website services provided by experts at competitive rates. Visit: https://www.indsoft.net/
