Some customers prefer to shop in a physical store, some to test the products before purchasing while others prefer an online store. For many, the premise behind buying products with their phones, tablets, or phablets is to get what they want as easily and quickly as possible. Thus to meet customer expectation eCommerce stores need to achieve lightning fast speed and reliability through their online store (whatever CMS or app they use).
Using a browser to facilitate the shopping experience is one way, another is developing a native app (although a native app is quick, downloading an app takes time and requires system compatibility (IOS or Android generally). Another option is to deploy PWA services for e-commerce, that work within the browser.
Overall whatever platform you choose to serve your customers, it’s essential to provide a fast experience, with this in mind here are some key areas to think about speed/delivery wise across the key eCommerce delivery platforms.
- Set Caching – Caching is an excellent technique, that doesn’t load unwanted data. However, it stores the data or a page temporarily into the memory, and the data or page is accessed from memory instead of loading it from the server.
- Optimise your images – Many sites use free stock imagery or there own pictures throughout their eCommerce platform. Images can enhance the speed at which your website takes to load. Thus, it is essential to cut on the dimension of your images while maintaining the quality. You can use any image optimiser to achieve this.
- Use a content delivery network – A content delivery network lessens the load time of any website and is excellent for sites, with more traffic. Also, you can use content transmission networks such as; Akamai, TATA CDN, and MAXCDN.
- Create a PWA – PWA’s aim at addressing the need for increasing the sales as well as customer loyalty through a faster page load as well as a seamless transition from search checkouts.
- Transfer to a faster Web Host – Avoid using inferior hosts if your site traffic is more than average. Poor or lack of hardware is one of the most common issues affecting the speed and reliability of eCommerce hosting.
- Minimise round-trip times – The requests required when a user accesses your website is referred to as round trip time or RTT. This request is sent by the browser to get data from the server and should be minimised as much as possible.
- Compress Your Website – Response times are lessened by compression of documents. For instance; Gzip is a great application which can be used for the task. You can also minify script documents such as CSS or JS files.
- Switch off Unnecessary Plugins – Many sites have many unused plugins, and they load different records, which decrease the speed of your website. Thus, they should be withdrawn or switched off to increase site speed.
The methods as mentioned above are some of the ways which can be used to enhance the speed of any e-commerce website. However, many other ways can still be useful. Furthermore, the speed of the website matters a lot to many since it can gain you the desired customers confidence and trust.
