If your ecommerce website is loading too slowly, you’re losing out on sales and revenue. It’s that simple. In fact, a whopping 70% of consumers agree that ecommerce site speed impacts their overall willingness to buy from a retailer.
To make sure your potential customers don’t end up going over to competitor sites, let’s talk about what website speed means for your ecommerce business, how you can check your site speed, plus a few tips and tools to help improve it.
Let’s dig in.
What Does Website Speed Mean for Ecommerce Businesses?
Website speed is a website performance metric that tells you how quickly the pages on your website are able to load. When your ecommerce site’s homepage and product pages are able to load more quickly, your website visitors have a better experience and are more likely to complete any planned purchases.
However, you could be losing out on some serious sales if it takes too long for any given webpage to fully load.
Data shows that a website that loads within 1 second has a conversion rate 2.5x higher than a website that loads within 5 seconds. But overall, 0-2 seconds is the most ideal page loading time.
Long story short: your ecommerce site speed could be helping or hindering your company’s growth. Pages that take too long to load will cause visitors to exit and search for your product elsewhere, while pages that load quickly can help increase sales and conversions.
8+ Ecommerce Site Speed Tips, Best Practices, & Tools
Make sure your website isn’t losing traffic or sales by employing these tips and tools for improving your ecommerce website’s overall loading speed.
1. Use the Right Ecommerce Website Builder
First, you’ll want to make sure you’re using a reliable ecommerce website builder to create your site. Choosing a site builder that specializes in building out ecommerce websites can help you feel secure, knowing the software hosting your website knows how to handle your specific type of website.
If you’re just starting out, you won’t need to account for a lot of traffic, but as your business grows, you’ll want to make sure you’re using a website builder that can handle more website visitors, more sales, and more product listings.
Some of the most popular and relied on tools include:
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Adobe Commerce
- WooCommerce for WordPress
2. Optimize Product Images
As a ecommerce business, you’re likely to have a lot of images on your website. After all, you want to showcase each product from various angles so your customers know what they’re getting and feel confident making a purchase from your website.
Here’s an example from planner company The Day Designer:
There are a number of product images showcasing what the planner, its pages, and its different cover designs look like. This helps potential buyers get a clear understanding of if this planner will work for their needs.
However, a lot of images can really slow down a website if they’re too big or they’ve been saved as larger file formats.
You’ve likely had a professional photographer take high-quality photos of your products. Make sure that the versions you’re uploading to your website have been specifically saved for web.
For example, the high-resolution version of your photos that are meant to be used for printed materials are going to be 4-6+ MB (or megabytes) in size, with dimensions of 6000×4000 pixels or more. But website-specific images will be closer to 200-600 KB (kilobytes), with dimensions of 1500×1000 pixels or so.
One megabyte is equal to 1024 kilobytes, so you can see the huge difference between those sizes. Uploading hundreds of high-resolution, multi-megabyte images to your website is going to cause the loading speed to drag.
But using smaller, optimized image sizes can really speed things up.
In addition, image file formats like PNG and JPEG are older, larger formats. Newer, smaller, and more web-based image formats include WebP and AVIF, and can further your website speed optimization.
Tools to compress website images include:
3. Limit the Number of Product Listings Per Page
When someone clicks over to view all of your products or selects a certain category, you don’t want all of your product listings to load at once. Instead, limit the number that appears on each page or that loads at one time.
You can do this by using a pagination method or by enabling lazy loading.
With pagination, you limit the number of product listings that sit on each page, and customers can click through different pages to access more products. Or you can input a button that users have to click to load more products, which is how office supply store Poppin manages their loading time:
Or, you can use what is called lazy loading. This is where you tell your website to only load part of the page or some of your product listings, then slowly load more as your website visitor scrolls down the page.
By limiting the number of listings loaded at one time, you’re making it easier for your website to appear more quickly for your visitors, reducing your site speed.
To implement pagination or lazy loading, you’ll need to insert code snippets (have your developer help) or turn on these settings within your website builder.
4. Use a Responsive Theme
A responsive website is one that works well on any type or size of screen or device. From a laptop computer to a desktop with a huge screen, all the way down to a tiny mobile phone, your ecommerce site should load seamlessly and be easy to navigate.
At this point in our internet usage, pretty much all website builders should provide responsive themes—but it’s important to load up your website on different devices to make sure it loads quickly and works well.
Take a look at online plant shop The Sill’s website. This is the design on a laptop computer:
And this is how it looks on a smartphone screen:
Right off the bat, we notice a few things:
- The website design is the same, just more compact on a smaller screen
- The menu has turned into a hamburger menu, which is easier to access on a smartphone
- Images and buttons have moved around slightly to make way for a more compact design
Tools for testing your theme responsiveness include:
5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (also known as a content distribution network) or CDN is a network of servers dispersed all over the world. Websites that use a CDN are able to use servers that are located closest to the person trying to load your site, helping to reduce load time and provide a better user experience.
If your ecommerce business only operates within a single country, using a CDN might not be a priority. But if you provide global service, you want to make sure that anyone loading your website, no matter where they’re located, is able to do so smoothly.
CDN tools to check out include:
6. Enable Browser Caching
With browser caching, you allow a user’s browser to locally store pieces of your website so that as visitors come to your website multiple times, it loads even more quickly than it did the first time.
You can enable caching within your website builder’s settings or by using tools like:
7. Minify Website Coding
Another way to speed up your ecommerce website is through what’s called minification. Minifying your website coding means taking snippets of JavaScript, CSS, and other pieces of code and removing things like line breaks and spacing that can cause longer loading times.
This spacing is added in as developers write code to help them keep everything organized. However, those spaces aren’t needed for the code to actually work. So using a minification tool to clean that up can be a big help in speeding up your site.
Minification tools to take advantage of include:
8. Consistently Check Your Site Speed
Keep tabs on your ecommerce site speed by using the right tools for checking in and gauging how quickly your web pages are loading. Regularly running tests can help you make sure your website is always working smoothly and that any changes you make don’t have a negative impact.
The easiest way to check your ecommerce site speed is by taking advantage of Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.
All you have to do is paste your website URL into the text box, then click Analyze to get started. You can also paste individual web pages into the box to gauge if some of your pages are taking longer to load than others.
From there, the PageSpeed Insights tool will look at the URL you input and give you a site speed score, as well as a list of things you may need to fix to improve your score.
Let’s take a look at an example. After analyzing ecommerce candle company Arbor Made’s website, we can see that most of their scores are good to go. The only one less than 90 is performance, but it’s still extremely close.
Although Google states that any score above 90 is good, and scores between 50-89 need improvement, other benchmarks say that a good ecommerce website score is above 70 and an ideal score is over 85.
So Arbor Made is looking pretty good. But if the brand wanted to improve their performance even more, they could simply scroll a little further down to access Google’s diagnostics details.
Google provides a list of diagnostics and the potential time savings fixing each one could add to their website. Arbor Made’s team could easily send this diagnostic information to a web developer and have them get started making changes.
If you run your ecommerce website through Shopify, you can access your own built-in web performance dashboard that will provide you with any and all site speed-related insights you need to know.
The dashboard will let you know if there is anything in particular that’s slowing your website down, like:
- Third-party apps or integrations
- Theme coding
- Image/video size and quantity
You can also see data surrounding how your website fares when looking at Google’s Core Web Vitals, or its parameters for a site’s rankability. This includes factors like your loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
Other site speed testing tools include:
Improve Your Ecommerce Site Speed Today
Ensuring your ecommerce site loads quickly is a surefire way to boost sales and conversions. If you’re looking for other tips and tricks for growing your ecommerce business, be sure to check out our guide to ecommerce marketing.
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