Just as department stores would decorate their storefront and craft a perfect in-store experience, you should optimize your eCommerce store to satisfy your customers’ expectations. Here are several things you should do to optimize your store.
Image Optimization
When it comes to online shopping, images often speak louder than words.
Having professional, hi-resolution images on your website establishes your credibility immediately. However, high definition images tend to have large file sizes that can slow down your page’s load times. If your page takes more than 3 seconds to load, not only the shoppers will click the “back” button, your SEO score will also plummet on Google. In Photoshop, you can export your images with the ‘save for web’ function to downsize your images without losing too much quality. You can also use online tools like TinyJPG and Image Optimizer.
For the purpose of SEO optimization, make sure your images’ file names and alt text include your keywords.
Speed & Performance Optimization
Google says if your website is slower than an eye blink, it’s too slow.
0.4 seconds is long enough to make your customers go to another website. If your page’s load time is slow, people would exit before they even get to see all your hard work. Use a website speed test tool to analyze your site’s overall speed and determine what you need to do for speed optimization. While image optimization is one of the important factors for good website performance, you can do a lot more.
Reduce HTTP Requests
HTTP requests affect the data transfer speed between a client and a server. The more HTTP requests you have, the slower your web page. You can combine your CSS and JS files into a smaller set to reduce the amount of requests necessary and avoid using too many complicated codes.
Minify CSS and Scripts
Minification means to remove unnecessary characters, like whitespace and unused codes, from your CSS and Javascripts. This can speed up your website’s load time as less code requires less time to process request from the server.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN is a network of servers that are spread all around the world. You can store and cache your static content like images and css files on all these CDN servers. When people visit your website from oversea or somewhere far from your original server, CDN will redirect them to the server closest to their location. By closing the distance between your web visitors and your server, your page can load faster on their end.
Check for HTTP 404 Errors
404 errors (“Page Not Found”) can cost a lot of memory on your server and slow down your website’s speed. Check if there are any broken links on your website with Broken Link Checker. Then work with your developers to fix these errors immediately.
There’s a lot more you can do to optimize your eCommerce store. Poor website performance can directly hinder your sales performance. Work with our development team at DigitlHaus to ensure your website performance is resulting in higher search results and conversions.
