Speed determines online success and E-commerce companies face the challenge of having to compete with giants like Amazon in terms of performance. At the same time, split seconds determine whether customers are leaving or buying.
Online shops are becoming ever more complex and data-driven. The loading times are hardly better over the years. An average web shop loads 9.3 seconds – after three seconds, however, a large part of the users jumped out of impatience. But with a few tricks and new technologies, it can get businesses under the magic limit of one second.
1. Faster Websites are More Successful – In Every Way
Slow load times are not only annoying for users, they also affect some of the key business metrics, such as traffic, user satisfaction, revenue, retention time, and conversion rates. Many large companies have published studies on the difference in performance in practice. Here are some of the most interesting results:
According to Amazon and this FastCompany.com article, 100 milliseconds of additional load time reduce sales by one percent (one percent of Amazon sales: $ 1.3 billion a year).
When Google tried to display 30 search results instead of 10 per page, users had to wait an average of 0.5 seconds longer. The traffic went back then by 20 percent, as shown in this article – http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html.
At Shopzilla, a load-time reduction from seven to two seconds increased the profit by ten percent and the number of visitors by 25 percent.
It’s worth it to be quick. Even more momentous than sluggishness in the page structure is the complete failure of a website due to overload or crashed server. Ever since Google has announced that the load time of a website in their search engine ranking is significantly influential, performance is one of the most urgent topics in online business.
2. What Makes Websites Slow and Sluggish?
Over the years, web pages are becoming more and more complex, but the protocols and infrastructure of the web are barely changing. As it stands, an average web page loads 2.4 megabytes of data and makes 106 HTTP requests. And that takes time.
There are two technical causes for slow websites. The first reason is that high processing times occur in the server when assembling web pages. This is often due to outdated shop systems with performance problems. The second bottleneck is delivery over the network, where every single one of the over 100 partial queries from website visitors has to travel through the internet to the server and back. The latency of the network (“latency”) causes so many users to have to look at white screens and spinning hourglasses before the page starts to build.
3. Good Web Hosting for Better Performance in E-Commerce
Since load time and web hosting are highly interdependent, the most effective step towards a fast website is selecting a good web hosting provider. Because this takes care of the entire technical infrastructure on which the own website is operated. This starts with the server and the software used and goes all the way to the internet connection of the data center. With cheap shared hosting packages with many customers per server, the problem is usually a slow connection and not enough resources for all accounts. Check this comparison table to find yourself a suitable web hosting.
The web performance problem can be solved with new web and cloud technologies. For the first bottleneck of slow and unstable servers, modern cloud data centers offer a highly available environment. But the software also has to play along. Although high-performance distributed databases and server platforms were developed on the model of Google and Facebook, but legacy technologies such as WordPress and Magento can not make use of it so far. Therefore, in such cases, the server backend must be rewritten and migrated.
The second bottleneck of network latencies can be addressed by so-called “single page applications”. In this new approach development approach, the browser is responsible for customizing the page, loading only the data that is currently relevant to the user.