Viralogy

If you had to wait 30 minutes to get into a theme park would you still go? While there will still be people who say “yes,” the fact remains that no one likes waiting. Similar to how Speed Racer was the best because was the fastest out on the track, when it comes to shopping for something online, the same can be said. If an eCommerce site is slow in loading a page, they are risking losing a potential sale. In an age where consumers have more and more options when it comes to shopping online, making sure that your site is able to optimized to bring a user the best experience possible includes making sure that your site has fast load times.

If you take a look at some of the top eCommerce sites, page load times are in and around 3.5 seconds max:

eCommerce Site Load times

Amazon.com — 3.1 seconds               BlueNile.com — 2.8 seconds
Zappos.com  — 1.9 seconds                Borders.com — 3.5 seconds
Dell.com — 3.3 seconds                       Overstock.com — 2.6 seconds

If you notice that your eCommerce site is slow when loading pages, here are 5 ways that you can improve your sites page load times.

5 Ways To Improve Page Load Times

1. Images on your site

One of the biggest reason may have slow page load times is due to images not being in the appropriate format. In the case of eCommerce sites, this can be especially problematic since eCommerce sites are often image heavy. As a rule of thumb, JPEG format is best for large images with color and PNG images for all others. GIF can also be used for small images.

2. Include CSS and JavaScript inline in your HTML

By including the source of external resources, you can effectively cut down the time it take to load your page. By doing this, you are cutting down the need for an additional http request by your site.

3. Caching

eCommerce sites should consider keeping copies of their content on their local machines. By doing so, you are making it easier for your systems to retrieve data. An easy way to think about this is to think about how you save documents on your computer. It is much easier to just open up a saved document rather than create a new one.

4. HTTP Compression

All eCommerce sites should look into HTTP compression which will help to compress codes such as HTML by 60% to sometimes 90% of their original size. This will help your site load content much faster.

5. Clean Your Code

When building your site, occasionally, an extra line of code that shouldn’t be there may get overlooked. While it may just be one line, every second your site is delayed, your customers grow more impatient. It helps to look over your eCommerce sites code to make sure that it is optimized for best performance.

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To find out how fast your site is loading pages as well as if your eCommerce site is getting good ‘grades,’ be sure to check out GradeYourStore.com