Test Your Ecommerce Website Speed
By Rick Talavera
If your company thrives off of e-commerce, optimizing the speed of your website is critical. One fourth of all visitors will abandon your site in less than 4 seconds if it doesn’t load, which could cost you customers and ultimately sales. Web visitors don’t like to wait around for a site to load, so optimizing your website’s speed is crucial when it comes to optimizing web conversion rates.
Fortunately, there are plenty of steps you can take to reduce site slowness. Start by testing your website speed. There are plenty of free resources available on the web to test this out – Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom’s Website Speed Test are two good ones. These resources should give you an indication of what branches of your website are running the slowest and can be a solid launching point for your plan of attack.
Once you’ve tested your site out and developed a plan, the next steps are to implement your plan. Cloud infrastructure company SingleHop has compiled some of the best practices for optimizing site speed – check out some of their tips below:
Frontend Solutions
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Restructure and reorganize website content and design with simplification in mind.
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Consider a responsive website design structure to accommodate for the rising increase of mobile web visitors
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Remove any old plugins or widgets that are eating up your load speeds and replace them with lighter HTML5
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Optimize your images with HTML5 markup and utilize CSS pages for static site design
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Use social share buttons that require minimal scripting and ensure that social media scripts load asynchronously
Backend Solutions
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Minify unnecessary characters to reduce code size without affecting the page display
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Cache any static content to decrease the number of requests sent to your host server
Switch to a scalable hosting resource to ensure that you can increase or decrease the amount of resources available to your site.
Rick Talavera is the VP of Engineering at SingleHop and the former CEO of eServer Space, Inc. At his time at eServer Space, Rick successfully led a team of software developers that supplied infrastructure and software optimizations for high traffic websites. You can find Rick on Google+.
