“The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy”

This is a well-known quote on speed we often come across. Speed Optimization is one such thing which can never give a second chance to us. Why not if it is an ecommerce website even!

Ecommerce is swapping the world like no one else. Integrated technologies, fast networking parameters, advanced programming paradigms have all led to the creation of this big digital giant, named ecommerce.

Statistics show that an estimate of 1.66 billion people in the world buy goods online, dumping the traditional way of marketing from physical stores. This number is surely going to get a shot to trillion in the coming future. Can you just imagine even in your wildest dream that something called internet can just revolutionise the world like this!!

As the numbers of online buyers are increasing, so is the number of sellers. People are opting for ecommerce business rather than the traditional way of setting up stores in the market.

The main component of running a successful ecommerce business is the ecommerce website! If the ecommerce website selling and promoting the products do not appeal, it won’t help getting into the business. Now-a-days, there are many options of designing a professional and well-built ecommerce website with platforms like Shopify, WordPress etc. The main buzz is that, among the hundred thousands of ecommerce websites available, how can you make your website stand among all? Here is when speed takes the walk. It mainly depends on how fast your online store loads in the Search Engine Result Page when a user searches for it.

Statistics gives interesting figures!

• Around 47% customers expect a webpage to load in less than 2 seconds!
• If a website takes longer than 3 second to load, it is instantly abandoned
• 52% shoppers said quick page loading gives an idea of site loyalty
• Even a delay of 1 second decreases the customer satisfaction of the website by almost 16%!
• 80% of customers aforesaid that they won’t return to a website with poor speed performance

So you get the crux? How important it can be to increase the page speed and load time of your ecommerce website. The image gives us a clear idea of how the website performance affects shopping behaviour…

What is the desirable load time?

According to Google, a website should completely load in 3 seconds. But unfortunately an analysis showed that it takes around 7 seconds for around 70% websites to load completely with the visual content to display.

Let’s look at some statistics to get an insight on how the increase in page load time also increased the probability of bounce in the good books of Google…

It means there is a lot hardwork to do to increase the website speed oomph up in the Google Search Engine Result Page. But, is there anything called impossible? No, there isn’t!!

Pro Tips to get you sorted and increase your page speed with these optimization techniques…

• Put a limit the number of HTTP requests because these take a lot of load time for your website
• Optimise your main files like HTML, CSS and JS by eliminating superfluous comments, codes, formatting and whitespaces
• Load the CSS and JavaScript files in asynchronous mode ,i.e. loading a number of pages at a time
• Hold off loading of bigger JavaScript files; this ensures that the other components of the website is completely loaded before loading the JavaScript files as they are larger in size
• Minimise the server response time; DNS lookup can take the largest amount of time and determine how fast or slow your webpage takes to load
• Get a check on the type of hosting you are using for your website. Shared hosting being the cheapest option, VPS hosting and dedicated server based hosting can probably give better results
• Compress pages with bulky contents as it can actually speed up the website by 2 times!
• Yahoo! Says compressing your files can increase the page speed by up to 70%!! So, enable compression on your site
• Allow web caching; Browsing the cache memory prevents from making a DNS lookup and significantly increase the page speed of your website

I hope this post was informative enough for getting started with trending optimizing techniques. Stay tuned for more posts coming up soon. Till then, start optimizing!!!