Customers Will Love You for Speeding Up Your Ecommerce Website - Part 2
In part 1, we discussed 4 things you can do to help speed up your e-commerce website so that your customers will not only love it but keep coming back to buy your products. In this post, we are going to take a look at even more tips that will help increase your conversion rates and keep those all-important customers happy!Reduce external HTTP requests
It is important to reduce the number of times a customer's browser has to make a HTTP request before it can load a web page. This is because each time the customer makes a HTTP request, their browser needs to wait for data from an external server. There are so many parts to a website; images, videos, as well as third-party tools and services such as Google Analytics. These requests can put a strain on your website's load time. You should check your external requests by looking at the number of requests on your site's homepage. You can do this by clicking in Chrome Developer Tools, then selecting the Network tab and sorting by request count. If there are any that just show up as 'other', these could be third-party services or plugins which you should check - then update or reduce them accordingly.Use a dedicated SMTP email service provider
Emails are crucial to the success of your e-commerce website. Your emails help you to deliver invoices, confirmation messages, and other important information to your customers. This is why it's so important that you choose the right email service provider for your business.
Choosing a dedicated SMTP email service provider can reduce spam, deliver emails faster and more reliably, and help speed up your e-commerce website by reducing load times due to slow connections or unreliable servers on the internet.
Optimise your WordPress Database
The longer you have had your website the more information will be stored on your database. This can lead to slower performance. You should optimise your WordPress Database by deleting any unnecessary posts or products, as well as clearing out old comments and spam messages from other people on the website. You will also want to check for plugins that are no longer used on your site which you may need to delete in order to keep things running smoothly. You can use a plugin such as WP Sweep, to assist you with clearing up your database.Use the best conversion rate optimisation tools
You can add dynamic elements to your online store to help you reduce abandonment. Choosing the right tools and plugins is important to your load time, so do your research before downloading these tools onto your website. You can choose optimisation plugins that do more than one job so that your site is not pulling information from different sources. Thus helping you to convert the customers but also, keeping your site running smoothly.
So, there you have it. If you would like to know more about how to get started with an Ecommerce website then please take a look at www.thewebguys.co.uk or even book in a meeting directly with Brian to discuss how to get started using this link https://thewebguys.zohobookings.eu/#/customer/brianlynggaard
A Practical Guide to Reducing HTTP Requests
While the article mentions checking for requests in Chrome Developer Tools, here is a more detailed process for reducing them. The goal is to minimise the number of individual files a browser must download to render your page.
- Combine Files: Use a plugin or a build process to combine multiple CSS files into one and multiple JavaScript files into another. This turns many small requests into just two larger ones, which is significantly faster.
- Implement CSS Sprites: For small, frequently used images like icons or logos, combine them into a single image file called a sprite sheet. You can then use CSS to display only the relevant portion of the image where needed. This replaces dozens of image requests with a single one.
- Enable Lazy Loading: For product images and videos, especially those 'below the fold', implement lazy loading. This technique prevents media from being loaded until the user scrolls down to it, dramatically reducing the initial number of requests on page load.
How Dedicated SMTP Providers Boost Website Speed
Using your web server to send emails (like order confirmations and password resets) consumes server resources. When your server is busy processing and sending an email, it has less capacity to serve web pages to visitors, causing slowdowns. A dedicated SMTP provider offloads this entire task.
By integrating a service like one of the following, you route all email through their specialised infrastructure:
- SendGrid: A popular choice known for high deliverability rates and a robust API.
- Mailgun: Designed for developers, offering powerful tools for sending, receiving, and tracking emails.
- Amazon SES (Simple Email Service): A cost-effective and highly scalable cloud-based email sending service from Amazon Web Services.
Using these services frees up your own server's CPU and memory to focus exclusively on loading your ecommerce site quickly for customers.
Choosing Conversion Tools That Don't Hurt Performance
The article correctly states that conversion optimisation tools can slow down your site. The key is to choose tools that are designed for performance. Many heavy plugins load large JavaScript files that block the rendering of your page. Look for tools that prioritise asynchronous loading or server-side operations.
Here are examples of tools and the principles they follow:
- VWO (Visual Website Optimizer): This A/B testing platform uses an asynchronous script, meaning it loads in the background and is less likely to delay the visible content on your page from appearing.
- Google Optimize: While being sunset, its methodology is a good example. It allowed for server-side experiments, where changes are made on the server before the page is even sent to the user, resulting in zero performance impact on the front-end.
Prioritise tools that do one or two things well, rather than an all-in-one suite that loads resources for features you may not even use.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ecommerce Site Speed
Here are direct answers to common questions about speeding up an online store.
Will optimising my database delete my customer orders?
No. Reputable database optimisation plugins like WP Sweep or WP-Optimize are designed to target unnecessary data. This includes post revisions, spam comments, and temporary data (transients). They will not touch critical ecommerce data like orders, products, or customer information stored in custom tables by platforms like WooCommerce.
What is the difference between reducing HTTP requests and minifying files?
They are related but different. Reducing HTTP requests involves combining multiple files into one (e.g., three CSS files into one). Minifying a file means removing unnecessary characters like whitespace and comments from the code within that single file to make it smaller. The best practice is to do both: first, combine your files, then minify the combined file.
