How to boost your eCommerce Store’s Page Speed for Conversions

According to Stats, 40% of customers will abandon an e-commerce store that takes more than 3 seconds to load. It clearly shows that page speed scores & user-friendly experience are the topmost priority for website development, and they help businesses to nurture market credibility.

Besides growing the brand, a fast and responsive website also leads to more conversions and higher revenue. This guide covers unique methods to boost your Online Store’s Page Speed or ecommerce website for maximum conversions. 

Importance of improving E-commerce Website Speed

In today’s high competition, it’s not easy for an e-commerce website store to stand out. It requires a high-performing website with a quick page loading speed, a user-friendly interface, and an easy buyer journey for shoppers to increase the conversion rate. The importance of improving your page speed correlates directly with some of the major drawbacks of not improving it proactively. 

There numerous drawbacks of slow eCommerce page speed are:

1. High Bounce Rate

According to Google, when an eCommerce store’s website page speed falls from 1s to 10s, it increases its bounce rate to 123%. Due to slower e-commerce store speed, visitors immediately leave it and switch to a competitor’s website. Such behavior increases the bounce rate of your store, which can affect your brand’s value, and search engines will not give a boost to your store, which ends up with a loss of sales and conversions.

2. Poor SERP Rankings

Ecommerce stores with slow websites will struggle to rank higher on Google, and it’s the biggest factor behind eCommerce stores not getting any sales and conversions. When customers leave the website immediately, Google considers that website irrelevant and lowers the SERP value.

3. Shorter Sessions

According to studies, an eCommerce store with a 2-second delay can reduce the session length by 51%, and that can affect the store’s traffic, ranking, sales, and conversions. For example, in 2020, the Amazon website slowed to a few milliseconds, costing $4 billion, i.e., 1% in sales.

4. Poor Conversion Rates

According to a global study, 80% of customers said that slow loading speed is more frustrating than being temporarily down. Customers like to spend more time on an eCommerce store page that loads faster and has an easy buying process. If an eCommerce store has a lower speed, it directly affects sales. Hence, it’s crucial to optimize your ecommerce conversions.

How to Boost your Online Store’s Page Speed?

If your website is loading slow, here are some definitive methods that will  boost your online store’s page speed:

Reduce the Size of High-Resolution Images

Images are the most important factor in eCommerce page speed. If you’re an e-commerce store with high-resolution and quality images, it slows down your store’s website loading speed. Software like Adobe Photoshop or WP Smush plugin that helps you to optimize all your store images, compress their size, and keep high-quality photos.

Pro-Tip: Percy by BrowserStack is the preferred solution as it provides pixel-perfect UI and makes it easy to integrate visual testing for web apps and components. 

Select a Fast Web Hosting

To increase your store loading speed, choose a fast web hosting platform where you’ll get dedicated hosting for your eCommerce store to load the store’s page smoothly and enhance customers’ buying journeys. 

Select a web hosting that includes:

• High-end cloud infrastructure
• 24/7 technical support to resolve issues
• High Uptime rate
• Provide server geographically located to the targeted audience
• Provide SSD-based solution

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Naturally, your e-commerce store has a large amount of content to display. Opt for a CDN that helps host your store on servers across the world as per the target audience to deliver the content (like HTML files, images, videos, etc.) faster depending on the users’ geographic location.

Browser Caching

To optimize the performance of your online store, you should use browser caching that helps browsers to store the most recent web pages on the server to load whenever users request to access the page easily. This way, visitors can easily access the store’s page with a fast loading speed. 

Reduce HTTP Requests

Having lots of HTTP Requests can also cause a slow page speed. In online stores, there are lots of elements & features added to engage the visitors and influence them to make buying decisions. All these features increase the HTTP Requests from the server, and it causes a lower speed. 

You need to reduce the HTTP Requests to increase your store’s page speed by removing all the unnecessary elements and features from your store and removing extensions/plugins for better enhancement.

Minify HTML, CSS & JavaScript

If your eCommerce store speed is slow, it is because of large HTML codes, CSS, and JavaScript files. Large files take more time to load, so it’s important to optimize these files and eliminate unnecessary lines of code, spaces, files, commas, and characters to make the files smaller in size and easy to load. This leads to increased eCommerce store speed and enhances users’ experience. 

These are the most effective methods that help you to improve your ecommerce page speed.

However, once you’ve implemented all these methods to optimize your eCommerce online store, then it’s time to test that your e-commerce store speed is high with a user-friendly interface.

How to Test your ECommerce Store’s Page Speed?

SpeedLab provides an easy-to-check website performance option on 3000+ browsers and devices, including chrome, safari, firefox, and many more. Once you’ve done the testing, you’ll get a detailed report regarding the e-commerce website page load time and score for desktop & mobile platforms.

Follow the step-by-step process to test your e-commerce website on SpeedLab:

Step 1 – Create a free account on BrowserStack. Click Here to create a free account by filling in the basic details.

Step 2 – Once you’ve created a free account in BrowserStack, then click on SpeedLab to test the website performance.

Step 3 – You need to enter your Online Store URL to check the website performance and speed score.

Step 4 – Select a Browser and Device for Testing

Step 5 – Get a Free Report

Now click on “Get a Free Report,” and SpeedLab provides complete insights into your e-commerce website performance, score, and compatibility on different browsers.

Once the test is completed on SpeedLab, you’ll get a detailed report regarding website loading speed on different browsers, FCP, and actionable insights.

Try SpeedLab for Free

Conclusion

With SpeedLab, testing your eCommerce website speed becomes effortless and generates a detailed report and actionable insights for your CRO performance. Optimize your eCommerce page speed by analyzing website performance on BrowserStack SpeedLab with 3000+ cloud-based real devices & browsers. 

Why detract from your potential market when you can support basic purchase workflows on most of them without too much additional effort?  

You can realistically aim for 70% global coverage by testing against:

• 3 device types—mobile, desktop, and tablet
• 2 iOS versions & 5 Android versions
• 6 browser families (and specific versions within each browser family)
• 10 screen resolutions

Try Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing