Speed Optimization for E-Commerce Sites: Tips to Improve Conversion
The narration ‘time is money’ holds especially true for e-commerce websites. All it takes is a few extra seconds to load a page for a potential customer to abandon the site and lose a potential sale. A study found that e-commerce sites that experience a delay in load time of 1 second see a drop in conversions of 7%. Therefore, for e-commerce businesses that prioritize the customer journey, improving site speed is a non-negotiable.
Below are some strategies to improve site speed.
1. Improve Perceived Speed with Lazy Loading:
For content-heavy sites, lazy loading is one of the foremost strategies to improve load times. Lazy loading is a technique that allows only the content that is visible to a customer to load, while the rest of the content loads in the background. This allows for a much snappier experience. For e-commerce sites that are image-heavy, lazy loading significantly improves site performance and user experience.
2. Compress Images without Quality Loss:
While high-resolution product images help in e-commerce, they also need to be optimized or they will slow down your site. The use of modern image formats such as WebP or AVIF allow high quality images to be compressed without losing quality. The use of TinyPNG or ImageOptim is recommended to reduce file sizes even further. In addition to compression, make sure to resize images to the display size required, which eliminates unnecessary data load.
3. Obtain HTTP/2 For Better Data Transfers:
Moving your site to HTTP/2 is also high impact optimization. This protocol enables the transfer of multiple files (CSS, JS, images, etc.) by a single connection which helps to reduce loading time, latencies overall speed of the site. For and e-commerce platform where multiple assets are constantly available, the ability to transfer data in parallel will significantly improve customer experience. For e-commerce sites, having a secure HTTPS adds to the sites SEO rankings which is a plus and increases customer trust.
4. Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN):
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores your site’s files on multiple servers across the globe so that users can access them from the closest location. This dramatically cuts server response time and provides users with consistent loading speeds regardless of where they are accessing the site from. If your online store is global, a CDN is crucial for optimizing performance, managing heavy loads during promotional traffic surges, and minimizing downtime risk.
5. Continuously Monitor and Benchmark Performance:
Optimizing speed is not a single action, it is an on-going process, and so it is crucial to continuously monitor performance and determine your site speed using Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Lighthouse to set and track your goals. The targets are an LCP of < 2.5 seconds, an FID of < 100 ms, and a CLS of < 0.1. These metrics are critical for improving the user experience and heavily influence your site’s position on searches as well as conversions.
Conclusion: Performance Equals Profitability:
Optimizing speed on an e-commerce site not only improves customer satisfaction, it increases revenue. Faster sites reduce bounce rates and improve purchase completion rates. Optimizing for performance using techniques like lazy loading, image compression, and HTTP/2 supported CDs ensures your store is accessible and efficient on all devices, from any location.
For a website to achieve sustained excellence, it is crucial to maintain its performance continuously owing to why we encourage on-going support to improve performance after launching a website. For details, please refer to our blog post — How Important Is Post-Launch Maintenance and Support for CMS Websites.
Essentially, however, e-commerce speed optimization is much beyond the basic principles of reducing load times. It is also about gaining the trust of the customers, refining their experience, and ultimately increasing business revenue through conversions.
