We don't take an hour to get a message from our beloved one. No time to wait for a slow website. A slow store could decrease user experience and could lead your customer to abandon their shopping cart. Worse, when they want to buy some products, but your site is too slow to load, it could bore them to death and wish for a better website. Quickly, they change the email address and leave your site to buy the products somewhere else. We need a fast device, fast website, fast everything. Website speed is something you need to check from time to time.

Tips for Website Speed Improvement
Image Optimization

Images or illustrations play the vital role in website speed. When you have tons of image to show up, you need an optimization system to make it faster in the loading process, yet still beautiful and has a clear view.

There are at least three tips to optimize your images:

Choose the right file type.

You can use an icon for a background website. But it would be a disaster. So it's better to choose the right file type. Mostly, people will use jpeg as the main option. Especially for important content like banner or promotion on your homepage. Less important image will use gif or png, but I think you should choose png since it's richer in color.

Reduce the file size.

Compress it to keep it low. Just like Google Photos that use file compression program to keep them give a free 15 GB drive for each person, but still has a beautiful touch.

Test the site.

If you still not satisfied with the loading time, you can try to implement other options below.

Simple Website Design

Flat design not just applied for a mobile app, but also for a website. Flat design becomes vital when people want a faster site to make a purchase. They don't have to load a lot of pages and they can pay the product easily.

Of course, you should make a simple yet useful feature to improve the ‘simple website design' theme. Installing extension to connect your store with the most used payment gateway in the region, provide available shipping partner, and many more.

Cache

Enabling cache for your site is important to ease the loading moment. When repeated customers visit your site, they can open it easily, quickly, and purchase the product right away.

Increase Website Speed, Increase Conversion

Mostly, we will use conversion marketing to make a visitation becomes a paying customer. But increasing website speed is also a method to increase the conversion rate. Amazon found that if their pages were to slow down by just one second, they would lose $1.6 billion a year.

As Ranking Factor

Google officially use website speed as ranking factor since December 2010. When you come and meet your developer, speed is the main topic to discuss as well. How many images that you would use on your homepage to increase the web speed. The web designer plays its part as the director. Which banner, ads, product category, icons, product lists, and many more. They all need to be arranged to be perfect so that the visitor and customer don't have to wait for too long to look for their product.

Also, as ranking factor, you can find your site on the top of the search engine result if your website speed is fast enough to fit the criteria of Google site rank.

Audit Periodically

We have talked about an audit for security improvement. And we know that evaluation is needed to make a better site. The website speed needs to be controlled by you and your developer. You can hire e-commerce agency to run a technical audit of your site. Especially in

Supported by Google

Previously, Google has used its old search engine system to provide the search result. But back in 2016, Google has developed a new system named Google Caffeine. It's a whole new system to make a better search result in terms of speed, index, and relevance.
Speed

The loading process is twice faster than the previous search result.
Search result.JPG

Finding tons of result in less than a second. It's quite useful, right? The only thing you need is maintaining your best work and reach the top of the search engine (except you have a budget to use Google Adsense. It would be different).

Index

According to LifeWire, The more results that can be indexed, the better results that can be achieved within the search result pages. Google Caffeine increases the size of the index, with some search results pulling back 50% more items. Though in terms of raw size, Microsoft's Bing seems to have the largest index.

Relevance

Sometimes, when we search something, we see one or two results that doesn't relate to our keyword. But Google Caffeine tackle this problem and change their algorithm. They make a smart algorithm to narrow yet enrich your result with a significant relevance with your keyword(s).

Google Search Engine Ad

Even though Google is one of the most used search engines in the world (they even has their own verb ‘Google' for online search), they still use marketing strategy like Google Doodle, make a commercial break on TV, or upload a video to Youtube as an advertisement. So you are fully supported by Google to develop a good website. It's your choice to make it better, make your website speed faster, and get more conversion rate than before.

Supported by Lime

Not just supported by Google Caffeine, you can add more backup from Lime. LimeCommerce also has a technical audit program to maintain your website speed. You can keep the pace and set your mind on the competition while us, Lime, make a significant improvement in the speed.

From finding slow parts in the code, up to fast cache integration, our team identify the exact problem with your store and make the necessary action to speed it up. So, feel free to share your thoughts and problems with us. Let's speed it up!