In 2025 and beyond, time of the essence.
Now more than ever, consumers are more time-pressed than in years gone by and as a result, demand faster access to purchasing products online. If your website fails to meet speed expectations, it’s a sure-fire way to increase cart abandonment and lose precious customers. Considering that 40% of website users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, it’s clear that optimising your ecommerce website to run as fast as lightning is a key priority for those looking to increase sales and conversions. We’re here to give you our top technical tips for improving site speed, straight from our developers! Without further ado, let’s dive in!
What impact does site speed have on ecommerce brands?
The importance of site speed shouldn’t be overlooked. Site speed can have a significant impact on various ecommerce metrics that can cause serious harm to the overall success of your online store. Here are the main aspects that site speed has a significant impact on:
- Conversion Rate: We can all agree that the number one priority your online store is to convert first-time visitors into loyal customers, right? Well, site speed has a significant impact on your ecommerce site’s conversion rate. The likelihood is that the slower your website, the lower your conversion rate.
- Brand Reach: As search engines like Google and Bing are increasingly penalising slow websites, it’s likely that a slow-loading online store will be pushed down the SERP rankings. This leads to diminished brand reach, less traffic and less eyes on your ecommerce site which ultimately will have a negative impact on sales.
- Usability: The performance of your online store is paramount to satisfying customers and fostering customer loyalty. Simply put, the loading speed, responsiveness to user requests and overall site performance is directly correlated to customer satisfaction so shouldn’t be underestimated.
Why is my ecommerce website slow?
There are many factors at play when it comes to website speed and it’s important to assess each aspect to identify where your site is coming up short. We’ve gathered the top reasons why ecommerce websites run slowly below:
- Unoptimised images: Uncompressed and unoptimised images can account for up to a staggering 90% of your page size.
- Convoluted code: Bloated code leads to sluggish loading and the bigger your website, the more code you’re likely to have.
- Outdated CMS: Some CMS platforms don’t run as well as they used to as they haven’t innovated or kept up with changing technologies. You should always be updating your CMS to the newest version to improve page speed.
- Lots of redirects: A website with a ton of redirects can perform very sluggishly as a result of pages having to redirect multiple times before reaching the correct destination.
- Heavy traffic: If your site experiences lots of consistent heavy traffic or experiences traffic surges as a result of sales and doesn’t have robust architecture, it can perform poorly in terms of speed and responsiveness.
- Too many plugins: Having too many plugins installed on your site can also slow down performance as there is so much activity going on in the background, even when a user hasn’t taken an action or clicked on a button.
- No caching: Browsers caching is a way to speed-up web pages so if your site isn’t using it, this could be why your website is running sluggishly.
How do I fix my slow website?
Fixing your slow-loading website requires a multi-faceted approach involving technical audits, analysis and implementation. Here are a few ways you can begin to fix your slow website by addressing the issues we identified above:
- Unoptimised images: Your images are probably too large so be sure to compress them without losing image quality using an image compressor tool and ensure you have chosen images with different dimensions for mobile and desktop devices to ensure rapid loading and the perfect screen fit for any device. There are plugins available that automatically resize and compress images for you so it’s also a good idea to look into these tools to see if they can help.
- Convoluted code: If you’re not a developer, there’s not much you can do about this without getting help from the experts, sorry!
- Outdated CMS: Ensure that you are using the most up-to-date version of your CMS platform and keep up to date with future updates to ensure your site is operating on the latest and fastest version.
- Lots of redirects: While we’d recommend enlisting the help of an SEO expert for this one, you may be able to prevent duplicate redirects by disabling plugins that are causing overlap and by reviewing redirect configurations to ensure they are optimised. If you’re unsure, it’s best left to the experts.
- Heavy traffic: Your current website platform may not be up to the job if your store has seen a surge in traffic in recent months. If this is the case, we’d recommend investing in a new website on a scalable, more robust platform that can handle large volumes of traffic and maintain speed.
- Too many plugins: Simply uninstall any plugins that are outdated or that you aren’t using anymore. Just be careful not to remove plugins that are essential to your business!
- No caching: Browser caching is essential for maintaining site speed. Luckily, there are many tools and plugins out there that can help with caching and in turn, increase site speed.
If you’ve got no idea where to start, we’d always recommend reaching out to a digital agency that specialises in website development (just like Limely!) for the most efficient and effective way. to get your website back on track to success. If you want to try fixing your slow website yourself, we’d recommend combing through each of the reasons we discussed above and ensuring your website is optimised to combat each one. Only then will you begin to start seeing improvements in both speed and performance.
If you are in need of an experienced team, we’re here for you! Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need help with optimising your ecommerce or lead-generation website’s performance, speed and overall success.
