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The need for speed on your e-commerce site
The speed of your ecommerce site is crucial for customer conversion. A recent Google study revealed that 53% of smartphone users abandon a site if loading takes longer than 3 seconds, and 79% of users said that they won’t return to a site with poor performance. Without taking care of the speed and performance of your site, you're not taking care of business.
Case study: from hosting to caching - how we shaved seconds from our clients page load
Love Communications recently helped a client whose site speed had slowed to a snail pace. The first solution when this happens out of the blue is to pump up the hosting server's caching software, however, it was forcing WooCommerce to fail - customers wanting to buy were caught in a loop where they couldn't close the purchase. We were stuck in a situation where the site was too slow for people to want to purchase, or if fast and efficient, people weren't able to purchase.
On this sensitive and resource heavy site, we had to find a solution outside of caching. So. we went back to building blocks. We reduced the site's requests to the server, installed Cloudflare caching, and generally went over the site with a fine-tooth comb, shaving milliseconds from time to first byte here, pimping out static caching there. We managed to bring the page load speed down to below 2 seconds, from a previous 7+.
We then went back to hosting support, told them about the problems we had when their caching was turned on and it's impact on woocommerce and they helped us configure in a way that didn't impact the purchase process.
Secret power and tools
We managed this with a mix of what my friend and colleague Jayson Infante calls our "secret power and tools ".
Rapid site speed is essential for all sites, but especially for ecommerce. With so much competition in the online sales space, you don't want slow load time to be the reason why customers aren't buying. The busiest time of year is just around the corner - get your site ready. Ensure you've tailored your category and product keywords for your audience, but just as importantly, ensure those customers swing effortlessly through your site.
Google speed update
The google site speed update in 2018 warned that pages that deliver a slow experience to users will be impacted. There are, of course, a squillion things that affect your google ranking, but site load speed definitely plays an important part.
For more info about optimising your site, read our post: 'Working with the google algorithm' .
