We’ll help you discover the most important things about page speed optimization in order to avoid speed issues on your online store.
Optimizing the performance should always be a priority, especially when there is so much online competition. From two decades of industry expertise with several projects under our belt, we can tell you that people no longer have the patience to wait for more than two or three seconds to load a page. If you have a slower website it is guaranteed that you will lose a lot of clients.
Optimization offers you many measurable commercial benefits while improving the site’s efficiency. It will increase the number of visitors which can then be turned into subscribers to newsletters, readers and, of course, paying customers.
By improving your site’s performance, the users will have a great experience and many of them will become returning, loyal customers.
There are several tools which can help you test the overall site speed and identify performance issues first. One of them is Page Speed Insight or our own Website Health Checker which not only displays issues on your site but it also comes with recommendations on page speed and other forms of optimization which are very important because you will know exactly what problems you are facing. With this information, you will be able to efficiently allocate resources in order to fix the most glaring issues.
The speed with which a page will load has become a determining factor for your site’s ranking in search engine results (and we are mainly talking about Google). If you want to have an online store that works optimally, it’s vital to have the pages optimized. Also, you and your customers will be very pleased with the benefits.The formula is very simple: You have a site that runs at optimal speed => you have satisfied customers who will return to your site => you will have a profitable business.
In order to have a fast site, one of the most important things is to have good image optimization. Smaller images appearing on your site should be in PNG format, while more complex images need to be saved in JPG format. The result? Images will load in a much shorter time and the customer will not have time to consider going to a competitor’s site while the images are loading. Combining image optimization with other speed improvements will help create an excellent user experience which will lead to paying clients.
If the Front-End is properly optimized and the site is still slow to load, the problem is most likely to be with your hosting company. For example, if your server is physically located in Europe or East Asia while you have most of your customers in North America, they will have to wait a significant time for the information to reach the server and return an answer. But if your site is hosted in the location where most of your business comes from, the response time is much lower and therefore the site will load much faster.
Several techniques are used to simplify the processes running on the server and in the browser. Optimizing them can significantly reduce the load time of pages. This process is known as front-end optimization (FEO) or content optimization. FEO focuses on reducing file sizes and minimizing the number of requests to load a specific page.
Test your site!We speak not only from experience but based on countless studies in this field as well. Nowadays everything depends on speed. Think about racing cars: every year, each competitor improves his car to compete with better chances to win the trophy. That’s exactly what’s happening in e-commerce. You should always strive to reach the first place. Do not wait until all competitors have gained a lap on you. Test your site and don’t be afraid to ask for advice and expert help. We promise you will start the race with a great chance of winning.