4 Ways To Make Your eCommerce Store Quicker

Having a fast website is more important than ever, with it being considered a major ranking factor by Google, as well as the fact that users have more choices when it comes to shopping online than ever before.

So, we are here with four things you can do to help improve the speed and therefore, the user experience you are providing. This in turn should improve your conversion rate, whether you sell women's tracksuits or garden furniture! So, let’s get into it! 

Compress Your Images

Firstly, image compression is a really good way to speed up your website. Having good-quality images for e-commerce is vital which we understand, however, this doesn’t mean that you need to keep them in the original file size to maintain the quality.

You can compress images manually before you upload them to the website or you can use a plugin, but we already know why that’s not ideal. You’d be surprised at how much the file size can be compressed without impacting the quality of the image, and this helps to take up much less file space on a page, therefore helping it to load quicker.

Reduce The Number of Apps/Plugins You Use 

Apps (also known as plugins) can be really useful tools to help you do almost anything on your website without the need for web developers. This can include having newsletter popups, improving your SEO, compressing images, easily implementing redirects, creating wishlists, adding filter systems and so much more. 

It may be tempting to download all sorts of different apps to your store, as it makes life easier and is very easy to do. However, you shouldn’t be surprised if this then slows your website down, as they involve a whole lot of code being on the backend of your website to create the functions you’re looking for. 

So, limit the plugins to the ones that you really need, and then where you can have other functions hard-coded in by an experienced developer, as this will significantly reduce the amount of code on your website, therefore speeding it up. 

Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Another thing you can do to speed up your website is to use a CDN (content delivery network). This refers to servers that are located in close proximity to the user geographically, to help speed up the delivery of different web content.

Basically, the content is moved closer to the user, to speed up the process when they request to see it (e.g. going onto a web page). This helps to deliver content more quickly and efficiently, particularly in times of heavy traffic. So, if your website is very image-heavy, this can significantly help the speed of your website. 

CDNs are available to purchase through all of the main content management systems, including WordPress, so it is simple to find and deploy one. Some platforms even have built-in CDNs, an example of which is Shopify, so you don’t need to set up your own as it will all be done for you.

Just do a bit of research to find out if your content management system already utilises a CDN or if it is something you will need to implement. 

Reduce Unused Code On The Backend

Last but not least, you can reduce unused code on the backend of your website to increase the speed. The more code that you have on your website, quite simply, the slower it will be. So, if you have any code on the backend that isn’t being used, removing it can really help.

Examples of this would be more obvious things like dormant pages or duplicate pages, or you can use different development tools to actually identify exactly which bits of code your website can function without. 

We wouldn’t recommend diving in and stripping any code away unless you have development experience. It would always be best to work with a developer to make sure that everything is properly backed up and that you avoid issues with the whole process.