Kleinburg Brewery
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There are plenty of elements of an e-commerce website that play key roles in its performance, and page speed is one of them. In fact, even the slightest improvements in site performance can translate into increased revenue. As such, it is well worth the time and effort to improve your e-commerce website performance, and here are a few steps to do just that.
1. Test Your Mobile Website Performance
To start off, you’ll want to see what your mobile performance is like. You can use PageSpeed Insights, a web-based tool via Google Labs, to give you customized recommendations about how to boost your performance on both mobile and desktop. You can also get suggestions to improve elements on your website that are blocking pages from loading quickly.
2. Test Your Desktop Website Performance
PageSpeed Insights will provide you with a desktop report as well that offers similar recommendations. Just make sure that you compare your website performance with your top competitors’ websites. Ideally, you want to strive for somewhere in the neighbourhood of 0.25 seconds.
3. Obtain a Grade
In terms of speed, your website will be graded anywhere from A to F from a tool called GTMetrix by merging data from Yslow and PageSpeed Insights. You can also get a performance report that can help you assess important issues that may require optimizing.
4. Score Your Website Performance
The last test you’ll want to do is use Pingdom.com to score your website performance from 0% to 100%. The tool has a “waterfall analysis” feature that can help you pinpoint any other significant issues and how important they are to optimization. This scoring tactic is highly valuable to revisit and test periodically. Once you know what went wrong and what requires fixing, you can begin eliminating things that repeatedly cause problems.
5. Use Fast Hosting
Not all web hosting services are created equal. Some are faster and more reliable than others and play an essential role in your site’s overall performance. This is of particular importance during high-traffic days. Look at your web hosting service’s projected traffic, memory limits, and peak user load. Contact us and inquire about our hosting services. Our private server has a scalable architecture that can manage traffic spikes from 100 to 10,000+ visitors seamlessly. Your website will load up to 27% faster than your average hosting company. Contact us to find out more!
6. Reduce and Compress Images
Images account for anywhere between 50% to 75% of the total weight of your web pages. The better-quality your images are, the bigger this number gets. Compression minimizes image size without sacrificing quality. For existing images, use Google PageSpeed to download optimized images. For new images, use ImageOptim, and for excess images, trim the number of images and watch out for empty image sources in your code.
7. “Minify” Your Site’s Code
Your site’s performance can be significantly slowed as a result of poorly coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScrip. To fix this problem easily, a process known as “minification” can be used that provides a list of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources to assist you.
Look out for the next blog in this series for the next 7 ways to boost your e-commerce site performance and increase sales.