Slow websites are annoying, and proof of this is that 40% of users abandon an e-shop if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Due to slow website speed, losses in potential customers can reach 7%.
Below we will see a brief overview of techniques and tools that will help you speed up your e-shop.
Magento is an open source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It is one of the most popular open e-commerce systems on the web.
- The right platform for fast website operation.
All modern electronic shopping machines are quite fast. But that is only until they start operating normally.
The speed of the online store does not depend on a single factor, but on the server, their completeness, their design and much more. Therefore, among several e-commerce systems it is better to choose the fastest one, even if it will be a little more expensive.
Almost all developers provide trial versions of their platforms. To check the speed of your trial version, open the Google – PageSpeed Insights and enter your website address in the field. The tool will show you the loading speed of your e-shop.
- The right hosting choice.
The platform for an online store Magento is simply a program. To use it, you need to install it on your computer. In our case – on the server.
E-commerce platforms work closely with the server, so it is important that the server itself is productive and its software is up to date and properly configured so that the e-shop is fast.
When choosing a hosting service, pay attention to these points:
- What country is the server located in? Choose the country of your potential customers. If that's not possible, choose the server closest to them.
- Hosting upgradeability. If you plan to expand your online store in the future, consider upgrading your hosting. You may need more RAM, hard drive space, and a more powerful processor to speed up your website. To do this, your hosting provider should allow you to move from a virtual server to a dedicated one, for example.
- Types of hard drives used by the server. Choose a server with SSD drives. They are much faster than conventional hard drives. SSDs are the key to a fast online store.
- Useful tools and services for e-commerce. First of all, it is important to have SSL certificate support. It is necessary for secure data transfer between the server and the buyer's browser.
- Image optimization increases the speed of your online store.
When uploading images to the e-shop, pay attention to the size and format of the image.
Images that are too large will take a long time to load and will slow down the website.
For example, if you add a banner to a blog page of your e-shop or any other page, reduce its width so that it is the same as the width of the page.
It is not enough to simply specify the width in the image properties and set a value that corresponds to the width of the page. In this case, the browser compresses the image to the desired size, but the download speed does not increase. On the contrary, it can even get worse, because the browser processes the additional code.
The lightest image format is JPEG. However, images in this format are usually of poor quality. Therefore, for an online store, it is better to use PNG format. Such images have a smaller size, but their quality is preserved.
It's better to forget about the heavier, but higher quality images in BMP and TIFF format.
This is probably the only thing you can do for the speed of your e-shop on your own. For greater speed, you will need deeper knowledge of code and server optimization.
Below we will see other actions you can take to improve the speed of e-shop:
- Minimize HTTP requests:
When loading a page, 80% of the time is spent loading various elements of the page – images, scripts, styles. To load each element, an HTTP request is performed. The fewer elements on the page – requests that are performed – the faster the page loads.
- Reducing server response time:
The server response time should not exceed 200 milliseconds. Check your website through the Google PageSpeed tool and follow Google's suggestions after the check.
- Page compression:
The smaller the page size, the faster it is transmitted from the server to the user's browser. To reduce the size of a page, you need to compress it. To do this, the server must have Gzip or something similar.
- Enable caching:
When a customer enters your e-shop for the first time, their browser loads a lot of elements from the server: HTML, styles, javascript, images and much more. It takes time to do this. To make sure that everything loads faster on subsequent visits to your online store, you need to enable the caching system. With caching, some of the loaded elements are stored in the customer's browser, so when elements are re-imported from the server, not all of the page elements are loaded, but only a small part.
- Connect a content delivery network (CDN):
CDNs store your website's static content on their servers and deliver it quickly to your visitors.
For example, your store server is located in Russia and you have connected a content delivery network to servers in the U.S. When a U.S. customer enters your store, the static content will not be downloaded from the store server, but from the CDN server, which is much faster.
We hope the above helps you speed up your e-shop and offer your customers the best possible user experience.
