The loading speed of your online store not only significantly affects your conversions, but also has a huge impact on your ranking in search engines such as Google. In this article, we will give you 7 tips that will help you improve the loading speed of your website. In addition, we will introduce you to use tools that will help you identify which elements in your online store are negatively affecting loading time.
First of all, we should make it clear that a fast loading time of a website should be guaranteed on all electronic and mobile devices.
This means that it needs to load quickly both in desktop mode and on smartphones or tablets in the mobile version for you to be successful in the online world in the long term.
As the result of a Bitkom study (to be found at Statista) recently showed, a full 60% – more than half – of German online shoppers used their smartphone in 2021 to make an online purchase.
“A mobile website takes an average of 15.3 seconds to load. This is even though 53% of users leave a mobile site prematurely if it takes longer than three seconds to load.”
For this reason, the 3-second rule generally applies in the online world: the ideal loading time is less than 3 seconds.
With this knowledge in mind, let’s turn to 7 tips that will help you optimize the loading speed of your online store.
Check loading time:
First of all, it is important to determine the status quo of your website to find out where there is potential for improvement.
One free Google tool that can help you do this is PageSpeed Insights. It helps you analyze the loading time of your website and identify the elements that cause your page to load slower.
With this program, you can find out what actions are necessary to make your pages load several milliseconds or even seconds faster.
Compress images:
Quite often it is images that ensure that pages of online shops do not load fast enough.
This is the case when the file size of the images is too large.
However, this problem is quite easy to fix. With programs like the Jpeg compressor, you can quickly and easily compress images in JPEG or PNG format (that is: reduce the size).
Images can be reduced by up to 75% of their original file size without compromising resolution and quality.
Check source code:
As you probably already know, web pages are composed of different codes, such as HTML and CSS.
Make sure that there are no unnecessary symbols or spaces in the source code of your website.
Since Google’s crawlers read line by line of source code when reviewing your page, such redundant elements can significantly increase loading time.
Enable browser cache:
The browser cache is the memory of each web browser and is responsible for storing files that are stored the longest when visiting a particular page (e.g. the logo, product images, CSS files, etc.).
By storing these files directly locally on the computer or mobile device of visitors to your website in the browser, you can significantly improve loading time.
In this way, the files do not have to be downloaded again and again by users.
In this way, you also help to optimize the usability (or user experience) of your online shop.
Use powerful hosting:
Choosing good and powerful web hosting is another important factor when it comes to improving the loading speed of a website.
Your hosting provider’s server should be well-configured and as close as possible to your location so that the provider can provide you with good service and optimal loading speed.
Use CDN:
Do you also sell your products internationally? Then so-called Content Delivery Networks (CDN for short) will certainly prove helpful for you.
Here you have the option of storing important data of your online shop, such as product images, decentrally.
Since CDNs are a network of different servers that are regionally distributed and work together, you can significantly reduce the loading time of your website when integrating a CDN.
Avoid redirects:
Redirects are often used to prevent users from landing on a page that no longer exists.
Although this strategy improves the user experience; however, too many redirects cause the server to be overloaded, which in turn slows down the loading speed.
For this reason, we advise you to use tools such as SEO Redirection from WordPress.
The plugin helps you identify unimportant redirects and remove them from your online store.
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