The “need for speed” is not all about driving on the highway; it’s what customers demand when they are shopping online. Your customers want speed and, if you want repeat customers and you want to build trust - you better deliver, and FAST!
Ecommerce sites, because of all the awesome product images and sheer amount of data, tend to be very “heavy” sites. This can mean a slow load time. Slow load times are unacceptable anywhere online, especially in ecommerce. You have less than 3 seconds to catch your potential customers’ attention, any more than that, and they’ll be bouncing off your site in droves – that’s a major hit to your bottom line.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way!
You can keep your beautiful product images, engaging videos, and other elements and still have a lightning-quick site; you just have to do a few things to optimize your site for speed:
1. Choose the right platform.
Your business will grow and you need to have the right foundation that will grow with you, without sacrificing quality or speed. This means choosing a platform for your website that is built for speed and known for scalability. That’s where Magento comes in – it’s built by merchants for merchants, which means it’s built with the flexibility and scalability needed to be fast and to grow with your business.
2. Get a host with the most.
Having an awesome hosting provider backing your site is one of the best things you can do for both your site and your business. Not only will they keep your site up and running smoothly (as long as you set the right foundation), but they’ll also be able to increase your bandwidth and add additional servers to ensure your site remains speedy, regardless of how much traffic hits it.
3. Use CDNs.
CDNs (content delivery/distribution networks) are the “best thing since sliced bread” for ecommerce sites. With all of that heavy content loading down your pages, you need something to help you load it all and load it fast. By using the CDN system of servers across multiple data centers, no one server is overloaded and your content isn’t dependent on only one server – it has backup. All of this operates flawlessly to give you, and your users, better, faster performance.
4. Compress images.
Images, especially the kind of high quality images you want to have on your ecommerce site, are heavy and can take up a lot of server space – if you let them. With compression, you don’t have to worry about it. You can compress your image files without losing quality or changing the image dimensions. This frees up storage space, reduces how much power you need to process the image, and allows your site to load this rich content faster.
5. Reduce flash elements.
Flash slows down everything; it’s very heavy and takes a lot of browser power to load. Because of this and due to dwindling support as more people make the jump to HTML5, flash can take forever to load and it can end up crashing your users’ browsers. If you can avoid using flash elements, you’re better off and your site will already be that much faster, simply by reducing or eliminating the use of flash. Plus, with mobile being so important to online visibility, HTML5’s mobile and semantic markup capabilities will work out better for your marketing efforts.
6. Caching, caching, caching.
Turn on caching to process pages on your site faster. With caching, requests for your pages are saved and when requests for those pages are made again, your server can use the copy of the response to serve up your content much faster than if it were a completely new request. When it comes to choosing a platform and building the right foundation, this is definitely something to consider. That’s where Magento Enterprise can help you. With the advanced, full-page caching and superior indexing mechanisms, your site and all of its content loads fast.
7. Do some spring cleaning, year-round.
Un-used, outdated extensions and content on your site (and your server!) can really bog you down. Periodically clean things up and clear out the trash to ensure the only content you have to worry about loading is the stuff that’s relevant to your site’s performance and your users’ experiences.
Speed is a huge part of a positive user experience and it’s one of the factors that search engines value when determining visibility. When it comes to your users and their “need for speed,” there’s no such thing as loading too fast, just loading too slow. Use these methods to keep yourself out of the latter category – you, and most importantly, your customers, will enjoy your site’s speedy delivery and performance.