Steps To Optimize E-Commerce Sites Speed To Improve Performance and Sales

E- commerce website load speed optimization is essential for user engagement and SEO performance. Search engines prioritize page speed, qualifying it as the major Core Web Vitals that determines the success of the E-commerce site. An E-commerce website's credibility can be deeply hampered, thereby lowering the conversion rates and negatively impacting the business performance.

Hence, for improving page load times, here is a curated list of major 15 website maintenance speed optimization tips to ensure high-performing E-commerce websites.

How To Improve E-Commerce Website Performance?

Once Core Web Vitals Assessment has shown something more should be done, then these are the best tips for improving the E-commerce website performance and the necessary tools to get it done.

1. Cutting Down the HTTP Requests

HTTP Requests prevail at the core of loading page web pages. Having more HTTP requests means a longer time to complete them all. So, remove all the unnecessary HTTP requests for a web server to have a break. No need to reference the script or CSS file in the E-commerce page's header if these are not needed. To increase the page load speed, cutting down on multimedia content is also a good idea.

2. Using HTTP/2

All HTTP requests are not made equal. HTTP/2 comes with capabilities that help the web pages to load faster. It helps in prioritizing the elements to load first, so the browsers can be informed which light resources should be requested before the larger scripts. It even serves multiple resources at once. The web host determines HTTP/2, so these are the resources for turning if the protocol has to be enabled. For each provider, the process is different. KeyCDN contains a free HTTP/2 test for determining whether the site is supporting the HTTP/2 protocol.

3. Eliminating Broken Links And Unnecessary Redirects

The web will be slowed down and SEO rankings will be hurt by a large number of redirects and broken links. Cleaning up the redirects is a wise idea. Using "Cacheable redirect" is a good option. It's better never to redirect the page to the site that is also a redirect. Broken links for page items like photos, CSS, and Javascript files trigger further HTTP requests, which slows down the web. Use software like Broken Link Checker to delete them. Furthermore, make a new 404 error to assist the users accessing the E-commerce site's URL incorrectly.

Screamin Frog SEO Spider helps check the entire website for redirects and even detects the redirect chains and loops.

4. Limiting External Scripts

In terms of page speed, it's always risky to incorporate external scripts. Since the code can't be controlled so if the script is slow loading, then it cannot be controlled.

Pages take a longer time to load slow-loading scripts, which causes issues like content jumping, which is measured by the Cumulative Layout Shift metric. So, each page should be checked to ensure no unnecessary scripts are loading.

5. Enabling Lazy (Asynchronous) Loading

After a browser renders a website, then it has to process each request in order by default. It moves on to the next command after the current task is finished. The entire process slows up with the larger scripts since the browser has to load the entire file before it moves on to rendering the remaining content.

This delay can be avoided by redirecting the browser to load the scripts asynchronously, meaning continuing the webpage rendering. The sync attribute should be added to the script tags.

6. Using Mobile-First Designs

Website performance optimization must include mobile-first thinking. Making most of the limited mobile screen space is the key to designing for mobile phones. Choosing fewer decorative elements is wise since these slow down a page. Simplifying navigation and interactions is a better option, other than flashy or unique experiences in need of external scripts and plugins.

Google Chrome's Dev Tools help to enter "device mode" for viewing what the E-commerce site will look like on smaller screens.

7. Compressing Text-Based Files with Gzip

HTML and CSS files are easy to load, but every byte matters when counting is being done in milliseconds. By compressing the files, the text-based files' sizes are reduced, so they can reach the customer's browser more quickly from the business website's server. The most common compression framework is Gzip. However, Brotli and Deflate even function better for speeding up a website. This is yet another feature set up on the hosting side.

Compression is set up on the hosting side. Even if most hosts have enabled it by default, still a good idea is to check using a free HTTP Compression test.

8. Minifying CSS, JavaSscript and HTML Files

To minify the text files, all that which is not a key part of the code, such as comments, formatting or lengthy variable names should be removed. Most of these elements are helpful for developers, but web browsers do not need them for displaying web pages directly.

Minifier.org is offering a free tool to handle CSS and JavaScript. Google's web. dev has a free HTML minifier for deleting comments, additional spaces and tabs.

Google’s PageSpeed Module helps in working with Apache or Nginx web servers for automatically mass-minifying files.

9. Image and video Optimisation

Due to being large, often multimedia files reduce website performance. If E-commerce websites are heavily reliant on images and videos, should be diligent regarding file optimization to reduce the burden on the internet connections of visitors.

The easy part of image optimization is resizing. Files should never exceed 20 megabytes. Only the main images should be big. Using free image compression tools is the best solution.

After reducing the file sizes, responsive design principles should be used to keep the website loading speedy for smaller devices. One smart recommendation is MDN Web Docs run by Mozilla, having a good responsive image tutorial.

10. Taking Advantage of Browser Caching

Web browsers keep files locally stored on users' machines that help in speeding up loading times for repeating visitors. The browser need not contact the server for every file, it can pull the cached assets from the machine's local memory.

Caching is the best solution for E-commerce websites since the assets continue to be fairly static. Even if the website is redesigned or product pictures are replaced, then what should be ensured is the browsers have instructions for re-downloading the new content and replacing cached assets.

11. Using A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Browser caches help audiences who have visited the E-commerce store earlier. CDNs closely stash assets for each visitor which reduces load times.

12. Auditing Plugins Regularly

Plugins, add-ons and extensions can be counted as huge time savers. Similar to external scripts, bloated plugins could cause the speed to drop down. So, revisiting the plugin library and checking to settle on the no-more-used hangers-on can help in improving website performance.

13. Removing Unnecessary Pop-Ups

Popups are unpopular because they create a bad user experience, especially on mobile devices. Almost all users have pop-up fatigue, and these erode customers' trust. The slowdown is real since these are the universal dislikes. Having them removed from the site is indeed the best decision.

14. Choosing the Fastest Services

After clicking on a link or a type in a URL, the customers ask the browser to query a DNS service to land them on the target site. The same DNS service routes the browser to the site’s IP address. The browser reads the HTML files of the E-commerce site and requests assets from the server or CDN for rendering the website. These are a lot of services grouped to display the site before the audiences. If one is slow, then page speed will be negatively affected. So, the cheapest option is never the best option for technical infrastructure.

Because the domain registrar handles DNS hosting, so it is a high performer. DNSPerfs records the ongoing DNS performance log so it's easier to check how various providers are stacking up. Speed matters at every level. Lightweight and streamlined plugins, security software and similar backend tools even impact the performance of an E-commerce website.

15. Monitoring Website Operations

A smart idea is checking E-commerce website performance once in a while to ensure there are no major problems. Through constant monitoring, there is an awareness regarding a problem popping up. These are the tools which help in the

The tools performing these jobs include:

? Site24x7 works on synthetic and real user monitoring

? LogRocket monitors users and identifies errors along with site interactions with which the users typically struggle.

? New Relic, an end-to-end synthetic monitoring system integrates with just every existing infrastructure.

Whichever tools are being used, ensure the alerts are configured to notify when anything starts going wrong. Fixing the problem at its early stage means disappointing fewer customers.

The two most important aspects of website performance include page speed and load times. The whole idea is the visitors should be navigating the whole content easily. Speed optimization cannot be only a one-off task. The process is ongoing, and various components starting with server hosting and settings to coding practices need equal attention.