How to Speed up Your Website During High Sales

The website speed or page load speed is the usual time it takes for a website to load and run on any device. It is one of the primary determinants of its performance.

This guide helps you to scrutinize and come up with ways to speed up your website loading time and thus improve the performance of your eCommerce in terms of traffic and conversion.

Why is website speed important?

The loading time of a website influences the performance of your online business. A fast-loading website can contribute to the betterment of your business by improving the customer experience. On the other hand, a slow-loading website will adversely affect conversion rates and traffic.

• Google ranking: The Google ranking of your website depends on your website’s loading speed. The Google ranking will go down to a lower position and therefore receive less traffic if it takes more than usual to load.
• Customer experience: Even if the visitors reach your website, they will leave out of impatience if you have a slow loading speed. And, more abandonment leads to fewer sales.

Having discussed the relevance of website speed, it makes sense that we discuss further how to improve website speed.

How to speed up your Website

“How to reduce website loading time?”. This is one of the most commonly asked questions when it comes to optimizing your website speed. Let’s check out the website optimization techniques to improve performance, that can help you answer this question:

Choose a powerful server

Choosing a powerful server plays a vital role in optimizing the speed of your website. There are 3 types of web hosting services or servers for websites:

• Shared Hosting: Though it is the cheapest, this one gives not-so-good results. You will have to share everything with other websites, such as CPU, RAM, storage, etc.
• Virtual Private Server (VPS): This system is half a shared and half a personal system. It is a shared system where you own and use some of the resources, while others are used by others.
• Dedicated hosting service or server: This is a system where you would not have to share resources with any other website. Though it is expensive, it is the best choice that you can make.

Show impressive but optimized images

Checking out for tips on how to reduce page load time?.

Website agility is important during high sales and you cannot afford to have a mistake during that period. Optimizing your image files is a major step towards achieving high speed. However, it is important to maintain the quality of images. Use better images to reduce their dimensions for better optimization.  

Bonus tip: Make sure that you load the exact size required for the web pages, instead of editing them in the web editor.

Use a flexible website template

It is ideal that you choose a flexible website template for an eCommerce store. Having an online WooCommerce store avoids the slowing down of your site during high sales. Also, use a responsive theme for your online store adaptable to any device will also help load your site fast during high sales.

Limit the number of plugins on your website

Plugins work like magic by adding features, functionalities, and whatnot. But the flip side is that the more plugins you add to your site, the slower it will load. So if you are planning to keep the loading speed of your website up, do some research on the extra plugins that you need. While most of them contribute towards extra functionality, some may just add noise and underlying problems.

Add a plugin to clear the cache

Although you should be careful while installing the plugins, you can also go for a specialized plugin that can help you to compress the images and files in order to improve performance. Clearing the cache always paces up the loading time and thus loads the content fast.

Reduce your HTTP requests

HTTP requests are created every time the website needs to download its components such as images, scripts, etc. The more the number of HTTP requests, the higher the loading time. Hence, reducing and combining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are crucial for enhancing the performance of your online store.

Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Managing a high sales day without your website crashing is a hard task. Having a good server alone won’t do that work. On a high sales day, the overflow of requests to the same server can cause overloads and slowness.

A CDN or content distribution network wares the copies of your data on a large network that extends the availability of servers. Like this, each upload request is made from the server closest to each user, and not from a single server that may be located elsewhere geographically).

Conclusion

To conclude, improving the loading time of your website is a key objective in order to optimize your online eCommerce store. Use a site performance checker to keep a continuous tab on the website. This will help you grow your business by boosting both traffic and conversions.