Methods of Improving Speed for E Commerce Websites

Speed is a major factor for e commerce websites. The average customer will only wait a few seconds for a page to load before abandoning it altogether. Of these customers, not all of them will return to complete a transaction later. The faster a website loads, the more a website is able to increase its conversions -- unfortunately, e commerce websites tend to be slower than other websites because they require significant resources. There are a few ways that web developers will often try to improve their page speed.

Using a Content Delivery Network A content delivery network (CDN) caches a website's static pages and images and delivers them from a faster third-party infrastructure. Both free and paid content delivery networks are available, with paid CDNs offering additional features such as traffic analysis and script "minification" (making scripts smaller). A CDN can substantially reduce server load, as all of the images and cached pages will come from an entirely external network. Reducing File Sizes for Images and Video Many e commerce portals have images, video, and other multimedia on their page. There are two things that an e commerce page can do: compress their images and video or host their images and video on an external site.

Either of these will improve speed. There are many third-party options for video in particular that let a webmaster bypass their own servers entirely. Webmasters can also go through their image files and make sure that the images themselves aren't larger than they have to be. Caching Pages on the Server Website caching essentially takes a copy of a page when it is generated and begins serving up that copy -- rather than forcing the server to recalculate all of the information on the page. The longer pages are cached, the less "fresh" the information on the website will be.

This may not be a problem for a website that doesn't update frequently, such as an e commerce portal that has a relatively static inventory. Webmasters struggling with speed may want to consider a professional e commerce design denver. It's often worth the investment to optimize a website in this way, as page speed will impact every transaction that takes place through the portal.