Like every eCommerce business owner, nothing will give you more satisfaction than seeing your website attract more visitors and increase sales. But if your eCommerce website is not optimized to handle a sudden spike in traffic, it will crash down like a house of cards. You’ll lose your visitors, but you also miss out on valuable sales. Hence, it is essential to optimize your eCommerce platform for peak usage.
So, knowing that stakes are higher than ever when it comes to the performance of your eCommerce business, we have put together a list of seven tried and tested tips. In this blog, we’ll learn how we can optimize your website in such a way that it can handle peak traffic. Let’s begin:
7 Tips to Optimize Your Website for Peak Performance
1. Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed
When it comes to the performance of your website, every second counts. According to stats, your website can lose almost 50% of visitors if it takes more than three seconds to load. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s what happens with a delay of each second in your website’s loading time:
- Your page views decrease by 11%
- Customer satisfaction falls by 16%
- Conversion reduce by 7%
Hence, it’s essential to optimize your website for speed. Make sure it loads faster so that you don’t miss out on potential customers to your competitors because your website could not load faster. Here are a couple of ways you can optimize your website’s loading speed:
- Minimize your HTTP requests by keeping the number of page components to a bare minimum. They usually take up a lot of time.
- Minify your files by removing unnecessary code and formatting. Take care of all those extra spaces, line breaks, and indentations.
- Use asynchronous loading to ensure your website keeps loading other elements simultaneously.
- Optimize the size of your video and image files. You can compress them to ensure they don’t take much space.
- Enable browser caching to ensure your browser can load the website without having to send another HTTP request.
2. Use Fast & Reliable Hosting
Hosting plays a critical role in your eCommerce website. Especially during high-traffic and high-transaction times, reliable hosting will keep your website on track. Hence, always look for a fast and reliable hosting platform.
Here are a couple of things you should look for in a hosting platform:
- Ability to scale up and scale down based on the traffic
- Projecting traffic and peak user load to avoid site crashes from a sudden traffic spike
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Delivering customers a great experience faster is one of the biggest challenges that eCommerce business owners face. But with the help of a content delivery network, you can easily do so.
If you don’t know, a content delivery/distribution network (CDN) is a group of servers distributed across the globe. It distributes the content delivery load through the server closest to your visitor’s location, thus ensuring they get a great experience at high speed. A CDN can also increase your website’s speed and bring costs down.
4. Better Track Customer Data with Google Tag Manager
While gathering customer data can help you make informed business decisions, it can also cause an additional burden on your IT and marketing teams. Your website can drastically slow down by using all those JavaScript tracking tags for general analytics, behavioral retargeting, and conversion.
Solution: Use a tool like Google Tag Manager. It compresses all your tags into one JavaScript request. As a result, you can reduce the number of HTTPS requests. Even better is that you can remove a tag quickly if any tag failure affects your eCommerce site’s performance.
5. Use Pop-ups Wisely
There are times when you might want to use pop-ups on your eCommerce website. And why not? They can save customers a lot of effort, and they don’t have to visit a product detail page to view your product. Instead, they can view it directly from the product listings page. So, why not?
But the truth is that pop-ups can dramatically impact the user experience on your eCommerce site. Here are the repercussions of adding a pop-up on your website:
- One step to the customer’s journey gets added
- Users may click on the pop-up by accident and get frustrated
- Your website’s loading speed may slow down
Hence, always use pop-ups only when necessary and don’t become a roadmap in the user journey.
6. Ease up on homepage hero slides
Hero slides are tempting, especially if you want to highlight popular items on your eCommerce platform. However, the size and quality you need for them can bring down the loading speed. Hence, it would be best to reduce the number of hero slides on your eCommerce website. A single, high-quality image with a clear call to action is enough. If you need to add multiple images, use no more than two to three slides and use srcset or Lazy Load as a catch-all.
7. Reduce redirects and broken links
Too many broken links and redirects can drastically impact your website’s performance. They can affect your website’s speed and hurt your SEO efforts. Even worse, they can trigger additional HTTP requests and delay data transfers. So, do some cleaning on them.
For redirects, make sure the redirects are cacheable. As far as the broken links are concerned, it’s best to remove them.
So, these are the seven best tips to optimize your website for peak performance and maximize your conversions. Hopefully, they gave you an idea of how you can offer your target customers the best experience. It should be enough to help you get started. But before that, I want you to remember that the process will take time. So, take one step at a time, be patient, and you’ll surely see your website reaching a peak level. Best of luck!
Besides, just using these tips will not help. You need to mix the approach with the eCommerce customer journey mapping technique to anticipate what your target customer might be expecting and how you can cater to their needs. So, keep that in mind as well.
Is there anything you want to know about eCommerce website optimization? Please feel free to share in the comments. I would be happy to help.
