DEV Community

Cover image for How to Optimize the Load on Ecommerce Platform Without Harming Clients and Users
Harshal Suthar
Harshal Suthar

Posted on • Originally published at ifourtechnolab.com

How to Optimize the Load on Ecommerce Platform Without Harming Clients and Users

The speed of a website influences an e-commerce platform’s success and creates an impact on conversions and sales. If a website takes too long to load, this will reduce the conversion rates and increase the bounce rates.

The loading speed of a site depends on the page weights, numerous server requests, unoptimized images, buggy code, slow hosting, among others. Optimizing the load on the e-commerce platform creates positive user experiences and increases the chances of repeat buys.

Check poor performance

Different pages of your website may contain different JS files, images, CSS, and content. The weights of different pages will differ, so the pages will need different amounts of time to load.

Since it is difficult to check every page individually, running a quality performance analysis on your website may be a better option. This will let you analyze the category page, product page, and home page separately to find out the one that is taking a long time to load. Since these pages are the common customer entry points, they should always be perfect.

One of the best tools to use to evaluate the performance of your website is the PageSpeed Insights from Google. Use this to find out of your site is meeting customer expectations in terms of loading your pages on mobile and desktop.

PageSpeed Insights evaluates critical site performance metrics and compares them with the User experience Report. The tool gives recommendations regarding how to improve the site performance, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Choose another hosting

According to the Ninjaessay in the marketing field, e-commerce startups tend to use cheap hosting for their store. With the increased traffic and growth of your online store, you may need to upgrade the hosting plan or change your hosting provider.

The hosting options depend on the size and nature of your online store and the specific business needs. Shared hosting allows different users to share resources such as RAM and CPU and is, therefore, suitable for startup stores with a few products.

VPS hosting has features for dedicated and shared hosting, so you share hosting with other sites and have access to specific server resources. Dedicated servers, on the other hand, are expensive options offering you full control over hosting and enough resources to support your store, no matter the size.

Limit your page size

Heavier web pages alw ays take longer to load. The page size is dependent on the volume of CSS files, scripts, images, and any media included in the page. The best ways to limit the page size are as follows:

  • Optimize images. Compressing or deleting excessive images on your web page may reduce loading time and boost customer experiences. You may also convert excessive images to Webp or replace them with those in SVG.

  • resources. You can review your website's resources and remove unused fonts, plugins, and scripts for improved performance.

  • and merge CSS and JS files. Minification of codes trims buggy or excess code pieces while merging reduces the server requests to speed up the page loading time.

Read More: Factors To Increase The Trust Of The Visitors For Your Online Business

According to EssayMama, a site students use best essay writing service uk, images take up most of the space on a webpage, so finding ways to implement three of the above strategies can dramatically improve your website’s speed. It will also enhance the user-friendliness of your site and motivate clients to keep coming back.

Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDNs have geographically dispersed servers such that when you enable a network, the files within your website will be stored in the servers. Every time users from any location access your store, the stored data will be loaded from a server, thereby optimizing your website.

Since servers are many, it will be easier for global users to access your website. CDN is suitable for all website types, but it is a great solution for websites with high loads of traffic. CDN can optimize website performance metrics and improve rankings on search engines. CDN connection improves the overall speed of a website and makes website maintenance efficient and effective in the long run.

Use WordPress Caching Plugin

WooCommerce is dynamic and allows all data to be stored in a database at your users’ convenience. To allow product pages to be generated easily, WordPress must process every time a user accesses your site.

If more people access your online store simultaneously, it may slow down or even crash. A Caching plugin resolves the issue by freeing up server resources to allow it to run efficiently while improving the loading time of your website. Limit HTTP requests

Popular hosting companies such as Bluehost and SiteGround have their own caching systems with user-friendly settings. WP Rocket is a great solution that automatically generates a cached version to keep your website updated.

Limit HTTP requests

A webpage with many elements attracts more requests for the browser to the server thereby affecting the load speed. There are several ways through which you can minimize the HTYP requests and optimize your site.

You can delete unnecessary files, images, and extensions and then combine several elements into a single CSS sprite using Spritebox, or CSS Sprites generator. Another technique is caching to ensure that when customers log into your website, the browser does not load all files at once.

For instance, if your e-commerce store is small, based on a combination of WooCommerce and WordPress, you can use caching techniques using third-party plugins. Magento 2 is suitable for large and mid-sized businesses and it allows merchants to access different types of caching on the go.

Optimize your product images

Product images are virtually important elements of any online store and if they are improved, they can attract customers, increase conversions, and subsequently ROI. You should add quality images on your product page to attract customers and engage with them.

You need to focus on optimizing product images without lowering their quality-optimize every image on your device before loading it to your site. For optimal results, use special image editing software such as Gimp, Affinity, and Adobe Photoshop because they can let you export images from the web.

The image editing software can adjust the image quality before preparing it for uploading. Another way is to use the WordPress image compression plugins to automatically optimize the image size for the improved speed of your website. Besides image compression, it is also important to consider the image file type for your website.

Looking for eCommerce Solution Provider For Your Business?

CONNECT US

Conclusion

Optimizing your load on an e-commerce platform should be a continuous process because business needs are constantly changing. Missing the opportunities to optimize your website may cause you to lose customers due to slow performance. The above tips don't require any expertise to implement, so as long as you have basic knowledge of CMS. Take time to find and remove any site performance bottlenecks, speed up your store and see the difference.

Top comments (0)