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7
Hazards that will cripple your e-commerce website’s load time
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Since
last few years, the web has become an essential medium to grow your
business as now almost each and everyone has a broadband internet.
Without having a website you are losing out so many good
opportunities for your business especially if you are having a
business of selling products and services. E-commerce websites are
going to be developed rapidly to sell the stuff and services online
but have eCommerce sites gotten speedier as well?
By
a research, it has found that the top 500 American retail sites
actually are 16% slower than they were a year ago. If a website takes
more than 4 seconds to load a business can lose 25% of its online
visitors. So loading time is an important factor for any of the
website to get more visitors on it.
Here
are the 7 factors that can slow down your eCommerce website’s
loading time:
1)
A limited capability CMS-
While developing any eCommerce website it is necessary to have a good
understanding of selecting a suitable CMS. Some CMS are there that
are designed for general web publishing purpose like WordPress for
blogging, Drupal for general purpose while some other CMS are there
that are built specifically for designing eCommerce websites like
Magento and Shopify.
Thus
some content Management systems are not enough flexible for eCommerce
websites or we can say they perform poorly during traffic peaks.
2)
An Adequate Web Host-
Running an eCommerce website means to get turbulent web traffic,
hosting a large volume of data etc. So It is essential to have a web
host that should be-
• Reliable
(i.e. Best performing servers and good uptime).
• Flexible
(that allows you to configure the things as you want).
Another
thing is suggested i.e. to have a dedicated IP address for your
account that ensures faster response during the period of high
traffic load.
Some
popular web hosts are GoDaddy, InMotion hosting, Bluehost, FatCow
etc.
3)
Large sized Images-
According to a research 45% of top web based eCommerce websites never
compress their images that they use and of course the bigger the
image is, the prodigious it is.
If
you change the size of the image after uploading them into the CMS,
it will not work. The size of images remains same (at least in
Wordpress)
You
need to use some image optimization tools to make images smaller. Few
of tools are
• ImageOptim
(for mac only)
• TinyPNG
(web based)
You
can use Photoshop as well to optimize the size of images.
4)
Not Keeping the CMS up to date-
It is always suggested to keep your content management system, your
plugins and other software on which your site depends updated(to the
latest version). It will keep your software bugs free and help you
out to receive new features that can improve the website’s speed
and performance.
5)
Large no of HTTP Requests
– Generally
a website is a collection of data files. Now suppose if a separate
individual HTTP request is required each time, the browser will have
to fetch a file from your server. If it happens continuously in this
manner the site will take a long time to load.
6)
Not setting Image Dimension-
Setting image dimension is very helpful in reducing the website’s
loading time. Here setting dimensions means to set the width and
height of the image in the code you write. What happens this way,
when the browser starts rendering the page it doesn’t wait for the
image to get fully loaded. The browser will allocate a box for that
image on the page and go ahead because image dimensions are already
set before.
7)
Not using PHP Accelerator-
A PHP Accelerator is a PHP extension that is specially designed to
improve the performance and speed of websites written in PHP. It is
hard to imagine a server without installing a PHP Accelerator.
Some
Popular PHP Accelerators are-
• Xcache
• APS
If
you have a website written in another language (not PHP) most
probably you won’t need any accelerator.