How Page Load Time Can Affect Ecommerce Site?

Website speed and performance are major concerns for most large eCommerce sites and the page load time plays a vital role in how well your site will attain a rank in Google search results.

In the competitive business world, when consumers are in need of instant services, a page that takes a few seconds longer to load often fails to perform as per the user’s expectations and this means lost sales.

How Load Time of Your Website can Affect Your Bottom Line?

Page load is obviously the most important part of any website and most of the time it is enhanced to accommodate better aesthetic design, advanced functionalities or even to add more content to the web pages. But unfortunately the customers or visitors are more concerned about the speed of the site or they are simply ready to move to some other site.

The website loading time is the major contributing factor to any page abandonment. Here every second count and statistics have revealed that slower page response time often leads to increase in page abandonment. Another point that needs to be considered is the fact, mobile internet users expect a browsing experience that is comparable to what they receive on their desktop. Mobile users are not willing to wait for a longer time and as per the survey they can wait for only 6-10 seconds before they leave the page.

Site speed is a great factor in driving the revenues as it has a major impact on the conversion rates and even the site traffic. Not paying much attention to the speed of the website will result in dissatisfied customers. The time to interact is the point when a customer can take an action on the page. Providing a satisfied user experience often increases the chance to enhance the sales and also gives the customers a reason to return to the site and also refer your site to friends and family.

• Size of the page: The page size of a website is measured in Kilobytes and it includes various items like the images, CSS, Javascript and etc. The smaller and cleaner the page, the better it is for your business. Ecommerce developers should always keep in mind the load time in mind while developing the page and try to keep the load time to 3 seconds or even less.
• Use in memory and caching technology: Using these technologies can help to avoid accessing a database unnecessarily as it can temporarily store a full ecommerce product catalog, customer information, site search indexes in memory and thus avoid calls to the database.
• Compress data: It is good to use Gzip or any other compression software to reduce the size of any data that is sent to a browser. The compression is actually done on the server side and requires changing server configuration files, but make sure that your visitors do not use older browsers as Gzip is not compatible.
• Images: Image dimensions play a vital role in loading the page and specifying the height and width is important, so that the browsers can easily create placeholders for the images. This helps the browser to understand the size of the image and often make room for loading other parts of the page.
• Optimize the ecommerce platform: If you are using an ecommerce platform, whether hosted or licensed, then check the configurations to improve the page load times. For example Magento supports content delivery network, speed enhancements and file compressions and etc.
• Avoid redirects and use fast hosting servers: Reducing the redirects on your site will help to reduce the load time. Redirects from old links to the new ones should be removed to enhance the speed of the site. The size of your hosting server also matters as the RAM, CPU speed and hard drive storage will help to reduce the loading time.