Online business will be successful only when your visitors get a nice user experience while browsing your website. What you expect from your customer is that they will hit your ecommerce platform and buy from different products you offer. Do you know what your customers expect from your online site apart from good products?
A website that is not slow. A slow loading website may be the only reason that your online store didn’t clicked! Thus, it is important to improve your loading speed.
Necessity for better website loading speed
A visitor may not know you but they will consider you a good brand if the loading speed of the website is good enough. Thus, it is necessary to optimize the speed of your website. During web development itself these things are to be checked by the web developers.
With a fast loading website you will not only have better SERP but also better customer engagement and user experience too. You may try the following to optimize your website speed.
Choose a reliable web hosting
Even though care is taken during web development itself, if the web hosting is not done through a reliable web hosting service provider you will not get desired results. Depending upon the scale of business you are into you may choose among shared, dedicated or VPN hosting.
Optimize the image size
For any eCommerce site the images are most important and thus you need to be careful. Always upload relevant images for keeping your customer engaged. However, while the images are very important but large size images is one reason that the website speed is slow? Thus, make sure that the images are compressed for optimizing the speed of the website.
Also you could use high performance image formats for the majority of them and resize them before uploading. For example as a product image you do not have to use a .png file that is 5000x5000 pixels since it will take forever to load and no one will ever see the full size. You can use a .jpg or .jpeg or .webp or even the same .png format but at a more reasonable size like 1000x1000 or 800x800.
Lazy-load images
Lazy-loading is the process of loading items such as images, videos, elements only when the user scrolls to them and they come in view. Think of the loading time saved if the browser only has to load a banner and some text at first, leaving the rest of the page for later. This is most useful if your website has lots of graphical content, like lots of products.
Depending on the content of your website, using lazy-load for it could boost your website speed performance even by 1-2 seconds.
Reduce Plugins
Plugins are installed in every website so that you can add in special features to your website. With time you will keep on adding plugin to make your website a better one. However, do you know that these plugins may be a reason that your website becomes slow?
In order to ensure that they do not slow down your website you can keep checking them and delete those that are not necessary. There are many plugins that will take longer time to process. Identify them and if possible remove them.
When you do the web development make sure that you keep in mind that the success of your website will also depend upon the loading speed. Thus take steps before hand and grow your business.
Make sure the fonts are visible while the page loads
Each and every website uses an assortment of fonts to display text. Whenever a new user visits your website, these fonts have to be fetched from their location, loaded and rendered. If you have a website that has a ton of items to load, the fonts may be 1-2 seconds late and in that time the text will not show up at all. This is an easy fix as you should apply "font-display: swap;" property to all of the "@font-face" items. This instructs the browser to load the fallback font untill the main one is available.