During the recent years, E-commerce websites have become increasingly popular, and their growth keeps increasing at rates 20% and higher. If you’re an online seller, or web-master creating an E-commerce website, that means that you have more and more competitors, and fast website loading is crucial.
Together with conversions and sales volume, internet speed also continues to rise as well as visitors’ expectations towards online shopping experience. Users are ready to wait for 3 seconds and not more – a 4-second wait will make about a quarter of visitors abandon your web-page, and for a big web-site a single second of slowdown can cost millions of dollars.
If your rivals’ websites are quicker than yours, all your potential revenue will belong to them. The longer you ignore the quality of web hosting services, the more this effect is multiplied, so why hesitating? Your first step is to identify the things that can slow down your website and eliminate these factors, because they may cost you income and customers.
Here are some ways to correct them:
1. Find an Appropriate Content Management System
If your CMS is not specifically designed for website needs, you can miss considerable benefits, not mentioning convenience. Currently, there are several variants for e-commerce websites, each with its own pros and cons depending on the traffic volume, type of shop, and so on. Evaluate your present CMS and shop around to estimate whether you could do better with an alternative solution.
2. Cache Static Content
Some particular website components remain the same from page to page. If you integrate those in a caching system, you can make these static elements load far quicker and boost overall website performance. Try various options and decide which cached assets improve performance the most.
3. Cut on Redirects
Redirect means that a user enters a site and is subsequently shuffled over to some other page on the site, or another file, or even another website. Process of redirection requires a considerable amount of resources and slows down load times. Therefore, keep track of useful and useless redirects and get rid of the second ones.
4. Choose the Best Hosting Provider
E-commerce websites have to deal with traffic spikes for several reasons: a huge and unexpected torrent of visitors, actions of other users sharing virtual hosting, lack of resources. No matter what the problem is, a website requires extra processing power during peak times. Without this power, you won’t have enough potential to turbo-charge your sales and make then phenomenal.
Therefore, you should find a reliable company, and we recommend working with dedicated server providers. With a dedicated server at your disposal, you will enjoy a well-developed network, high loading speed and reliable services. To top it off, the service comes with 99.99% uptime and quality customer support.
5. Boost the Results with a Content Delivery Network
If you own a prominent E-commerce store with thousands of visitors daily, and your target audience is spread over the world, you need something else to add up to your server. A CDN (content delivery network) can greatly accelerate your website, especially if it has large images, video files and other media. It caches website content in edge servers in different locations to help users get these assets much quicker. Of course, you need to figure out a suitable CDN for your business, because they are not equally helpful for particular projects.
Just like regular customers, online shoppers hate waiting. Putting user experience on pedestal and providing them with sufficient speed and performance, you will see positive results in the short term and get more loyal shoppers. Keep in mind that a decent level of web hosting solution is the guarantee of quick loading. Check your website for possible mistakes and try to get rid of them.
comments