5 Ways to Speed Up Your E-Commerce Site

The E-Commerce industry is one of the most unforgiving settings in which to run a business.  These days, potential customers expect lightning-fast response time from every website that they visit, and are quick to shift loyalties when they do not receive the experience that they are looking for.

In managing an E-Commerce business, website load time is always a top-of-mind issue.  Here are a couple statistics that make the importance of user experience painfully evident…

-Forrester- End users become impatient when websites take longer than 2 seconds to load.

-Kohavi/Longbotham- Every 100 ms increase in load time = 1% decreased sales.

-Google- Now uses website load time as a ranking factor for search… thus optimizing load time is another very important step in SEO (more on this in a later post).

Here is an interesting post by Peer1 Hosting that delves into parallel research, and then derives this graph for website visitor loss due to load time:

Credit: Peer1 Hosting

There have been a myriad of articles on this issue, but most businesses still focus primarily on the code and design of the website, rather than also addressing the efficient delivery of the package once it is finished.

Here are 5 crucial steps to accelerate your website load time and increase revenue:

1)      Reduce the number of resources on each page. Every extra JavaScript file, StyleSheet and image adds another HTTP request. You can merge these files together to reduce the HTTP requests and the browser’s time to load a page.

2)      Compress the content. On the web smaller is better, and compression comes in lots of forms – gzip compression of text files, white space and comment removal, and resampling images to make them smaller.

3)      Use a measurement tool. There is a saying… “you get what you measure.”  Tools like YSlow and Google PageSpeed will analyze and grade your webpages against performance best practices.  Once the site is publically visible, WebPageTest is a great tool for accurately measuring the load time of a website.

4)      DNS. This is the essential first step of website load, and is often overlooked.  Employing “cloud” DNS services means 100% uptime and the fastest possible resolution when a new customer comes to your site.

5)      Cloud Acceleration. The final step of delivering the content to your users is also one of the most important.  Cloud Acceleration services step beyond what CDNs can offer through caching, and deliver dynamic content efficiently for site load time decreases of 10x or more.

Shaving a few seconds off of your website delivery time has huge implications for your conversion rate and bottom line.  Is your website operating at maximum speed?

Jonathan Hoppe

Tagged as: Cloud Acceleration, DNS, E-Commerce, Google Page Rank, SEO