For the Holiday Rush Ecommerce Site Speed Matters

DynamicWeb

‘Tis another holiday season in the 21st Century, and what does that mean? Hundreds and thousands of Santa Clauses and desperate parents are picking up their tablets and laptops and looking to fill their shopping carts with ecommerce goodies. And one way for you to raise those holiday conversion rates is to lower your loading times.

Ecommerce has done an amazing job in minimizing the hassle of finding a parking spot, fighting crowds, and waiting online. What used to take hours now takes 2 minutes. But with changing metrics come changing expectations. 

Consumers don’t want to wait around even minutes while shopping online. You might have heard that an extra two seconds to load your webstore affects your conversion rates. But how about an extra 2 milliseconds? According to Matt Cutts from Google, “Milliseconds matter.”

As if your customers’ standards couldn’t get any higher, speed is even more important for mobile. According to Econsultancy’s report on optimization for mobile websites and apps, people get even more impatient while surfing on their smartphones. Nearly 75% of users would abandon a mobile site that took longer than five seconds to load.

In a world where customers don’t have to wait around at the mall, in line at the store, or in the parking lot, the takeaway lesson is that if you want to increase your conversions or just get people to stay on your website, then you need to speed it up.

When thinking of how to optimize your site speed, it’s best to prioritize different parts of the page. What do you want to load first? One good solution is to have everything above the fold begin loading before the rest. Then as a customer reads the new information immediately in front of him, your site loads the remainder. By loading everything above the fold first, you give a great first impression of a fast-loading site.

Image file size is another huge offender, pun intended. Larger file sizes load more slowly. Simply reducing the size of your image files often speeds up your site. You want to find the right balance between compression that makes your files a manageable size, yet still maintains the high quality of your images.

Advertisements are a great way to generate revenue, but depending on the ad network code, this may be causing your site to load slowly. And speaking of code, make sure that your own HTML code is simplified. Bloated HTML code increases the amount of information sent out to users which, in turn, increases the loading time.

Implementing a tag management system may also decrease your page’s loading time. Tags are used in analytics which are necessary to track website performance. In addition to analytics, tags also exist for ads, SEO, and affiliates. Ecommerce sites frequently have an abundance of tags. Unfortunately, too many of these tags, often JavaScript-based, cause loading times to take a hit.

Because consumers don’t want to suffer those interminable waits at shopping malls and overflowing parking lots during the holiday season, they are making their exodus to the greener pastures of ecommerce. Hopefully, your ecommerce. These customers are an impatient group, so make sure that your site is speedy and clear. And have a great holiday for yourself and for your business.