Having a business on the internet means taking into account a range of priorities that will be essential for your online store not to lose customers to the competition.
Having a harmonious site, creating optimized content, and offering a satisfactory experience are no longer optional, but mandatory. And all this needs to be perfectly working so that your site's performance doesn't suffer and contribute to low visibility in search engines or low conversion into sales.
In today's article we will show you 5 essential steps to improve the performance of your e-commerce, taking into account the speed, loading time and usability on mobile devices. But first, let's take a look at what performance actually is?
What is performance?
Performance is deeply related to the experience that a user has when navigating on a site or application. Factors such as design, usability and site architecture are points constantly analyzed by UX professionals to understand the factors that may be impacting a store to increase conversion for example.
Loading time is the primary factor, since it determines whether or not the consumer will complete a purchase, for example.
Research shows that consumers are less tempted to buy when loading times are slower than expected. Still other research indicates that the ideal loading time is around 3 seconds (longer loading times give huge gaps for the customer to complete his purchase at your competitor).
The reasons for not achieving optimal performance can be derived from animations or effects that look nice but slow down the loading process. Large media files or third-party functionality. To find out what may be impacting your site's performance, check out the 5 steps that can help you improve your e-commerce performance.
1º Check your store's design elements
Factors such as the navigation menu, layout, visual identity, content, and the feeling that the visitor will have when accessing your store are the basics to have a good designer. However, many professionals end up extrapolating a bit in the use of many colors, animations, effects and other things that do not favor the performance of your site.
Is everything that is part of your design essential to be there? According to research, the consumer prefers to give up things like animations, transitions, and effects if it means faster navigation.
2º Optimize your store's code
Code optimization needs to be done by a professional developer. He can identify which elements of your HTML can be renamed to make the semantics of the code better and more efficient for search engines to read.
CSS can also be a factor that is hurting your performance, through inefficient selectors that end up increasing the loading of a page by up to 5.5%. It is worth mentioning that a CSS with efficient selectors facilitates future maintenance.
3º Evaluate Requests and JavaScript
Requests for third-party applications or functionality are a factor worth evaluating in terms of how they impact your performance. We have the habit of adding new elements, new functions, but we forget to delete the old ones. All of these generate browser requests that take a while to communicate.
Speaking of JavaScript, if your site does not use techniques such as Lazy Loading, loading information and items not requested by the user may be increasing the download time of your page and harming your experience.
With asynchronous loading, it is possible to reduce loading time and still have pages with larger destinations but that work according to the user's navigation.
4º Check the images and media available on the site
Very large images reduce considerably the loading speed of your online store.
You can optimize your images by compressing them or by using plugins or scripts. Whichever technique you choose, it will speed up the loading time and contribute to the performance of your e-commerce.
It is worth noting that any changes you wish to make should be made by a professional developer.
5º Create a report using analysis tools
Now that you know what you should analyze in your store, it is time to know how to do this analysis that will help you identify the points of poor performance and adjust them with more conviction.
We recommend using tools such as SpeedBy, which analyzes your site and shows you the current situation and how to improve performance.
The tool generates a free report with the main information about your site on mobile and desktop devices and even gives you tips on how to improve each of the points analyzed.
If you like the subject and want to go even deeper, we suggest reading our "Performance Guide" that will teach you step by step how to analyze your site's performance with complete and reliable tools.
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