7 Tips to Keep Your Ecommerce Site Fast and Stable
Source: Pexels
Imagine you’re a customer; what do you think would happen if it took a website five seconds or even eight seconds to load? You’d get tired, annoyed, and then leave the website.
Experiences like this can impact your customer experience. A poor customer experience could translate into a lost sale and the loss of potential customers.
In e-commerce, time is crucial, and every second counts when it comes to performance: if a website takes more than three seconds to load on average, it will add around 10% to bounce rates.
If a user has a poor experience on your website, they’ll leave before three seconds are up!
According to the Aberdeen Group, 53% of shoppers will abandon a website if it takes more than four seconds to load.
In this article, we’ll be exploring seven tips on how to keep your e-commerce site fast and stable. Let’s get into it!
1. Constantly update your content
Constantly update and refresh your website’s content, so visitors don’t see old information when visiting your store. This can ensure that you keep your site fresh and relevant.
Updating content improves customer experience and increases your search engine rankings as search engines will see the freshness of your site.
For example, if you have a blog about content writing tips from two years ago, you should update it with relevant information.
You don’t have to do it yourself since you can hire other people, such as freelancers, to update your site’s content for you.
An extra tip is to use an attendance tracking software so it’s easy to process payroll and performance monitoring.
2. Use a fast, dependable host
Hosting is the foundation of any website. Your e-commerce site will crumble if you don’t have a stable host.
A dependable host keeps your site up and running no matter how much traffic it gets.
Fast hosting can speed up your entire website, not just individual pages or product pages. Shopify, for example, is a company that provides reliable hosting.
Source: Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform loved by people who own online stores. It is the go-to platform of e-commerce entrepreneurs.
A fast web host ensures visitors don’t have to wait for your page to load before shopping or making a purchase — this means more sales!
3. Pay attention to your traffic
It’s essential to pay attention to where your traffic originates and the quality. Too much traffic can make a site load slower, so it’s vital to focus on quality instead of quantity when it comes to traffic.
(Not to mention, you might be getting bot traffic which is harmful to your site.)
If you’re getting irrelevant (or harmful) traffic, such as bot traffic or referral visitors from harmful sites, such as gambling or porn, you need to get rid of them.
Although this would mean fewer views, you’d get a faster site and virtually the same if not better conversion rates.
If you’re unfamiliar with how much traffic you receive daily, now is the time to start content tracking. Traffic usually comes from social media interaction posts or links.
4. Use high-quality photos and graphics
It is essential to use high-quality images and graphics. The larger the file size of your images, the longer it will take for them to load.
Before it appears on your screen, the page needs to download every image first. The more images there are, the longer it takes for your page to load completely (or even partially).
While this may seem obvious, many e-commerce sites use low-quality images that result in poor quality on mobile devices and slow page loads on desktop browsers.
When choosing photos for your site, look for ones with high resolution so they look good when scaled down (which happens when users view them on mobile devices).
5. Repair broken links
Source: Dreamhost.com
To keep your site as fast as possible, you must ensure that all of its content is accessible by crawlers and search engines.
This means fixing broken links on your website so that they point to the right page or resource.
When someone clicks on a broken link, it will make your site load slowly because of the extra code it downloads.
It can lead to lost sales and customer frustration because they provide no results when clicked on by visitors who expect more information or an actual purchase after clicking on a link.
Not to mention that such instances would cause you to be penalized by Google and damage the credibility of your website.
Ensure that the links are correctly embedded when you buy seo articles and lead to the desired page. You can also redirect error 404 pages from a broken link to a working page such as your home page.
6. Be mindful of the number of plugins you choose to use
It’s no secret that e-commerce sites are becoming increasingly complex. The more a site grows, the more plugins you’ll need to manage it.
It’s tempting to install every plugin that promises to solve a problem for you. But if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with a bloated website that generally takes forever to load and runs very slowly.
Source: Shopify
There’s a good chance that some of these plugins are slowing down your website even more than they’re helping it. You should also be strategic about which plugins you use for specific tasks.
For example, don’t use every possible plugin for email marketing because you’ll overload your server with requests from multiple sources at once.
Instead, choose one or two to handle all your marketing needs, so there’s less chance of failure in the future.
7. Keep your website maintained
Keeping your e-commerce site fast and stable requires constant maintenance. You can often get lost in other tasks before you realize your website’s performance is affecting customer experience.
For this purpose, you can use project workflow software to organize your tasks and calendar.
Ready to have a stable and fast Ecommerce site?
Good performance and top speed have become the competitive essentials for the success of an e-commerce site.
A fast site is a happy customer, but it’s also a happy search engine. If your site is slow, Google may not rank it as highly in its search results. And if your site goes down or slows down, you’ll lose sales.
Whether you are starting a new business or improving the one you already have, following these seven tips can keep your e-commerce site fast and stable.