Site Speed for eCommerce (10 Must-Know Tips)

To quote the movie Top Gun: “I feel the need, the need for speed.”

Well, this should be the mantra of your eCommerce SEO strategy, where site speed can make the difference between closing a sale and losing one.

Online customers are a pretty impatient lot. Stats show that customers are only prepared to wait two seconds for a page to load. After that, you’ll start losing them.

In this blog, we'll explore why site speed is crucial for eCommerce SEO and share 10 practical tips to help you to optimise your website for faster performance. Here's what you'll learn:

What Is Site Speed?
Why Site Speed Matters for eCommerce SEO
How to Check Your Site Speed
10 Ways to Improve Your eCommerce Shop Speed

What is Site Speed?

Site speed is how long it takes for a web page to load from the moment the customer hits the Enter key to when they can start browsing through your product page.

Lots of things can influence site speed: social media widgets, unoptimised images, animations, videos, etc. Clutter is the enemy of the eCommerce store owner.

A site unoptimised for mobile devices can also throw a huge spanner in the works.

As well as losing customers, you would also lose your top spot in Google. The search giant prioritises faster-loading websites.

Why is Site Speed Important for eCommerce SEO?

Online shops are the same as offline shops – the customer experience is everything.

Making them wait or annoying them in some other way will make them leave and go to your rival down the street. Or leave you a bad review.

Customers love a fast, smooth shopping experience. They don’t want hiccups and speed bumps. They want to feel like they’re being treated like VIPs.

Therefore, the faster and smoother your website, the more likely it will be that you’re going to get their credit card number.

The other major reason why site speed is important is that Google is obsessed with site speed. They just can’t get enough of it.

So much so, that if they determine your site is too slow, they’ll start dropping your search engine ranking for eCommerce.

How to Check Your Online Shop's Speed

Google has a handy online tool to check your site speed and to see if you measure up to their strict standards.

Just enter your site URL, and it will begin analysing the site for all possibilities that are slowing your site down. It will then assign a score for each benchmark.

By scrolling further down the page, you’ll get a detailed list of the things you need to do to improve your online visibility in terms of website speed.

Unless you’re a technical SEO for ecommerce specialist, you will likely need a developer to resolve these speed issues.

But once they’re fixed, your customers will benefit from an improved mobile and desktop shopping experience.

10 Ways to Improve Your eCommerce Shop Speed

Here are 10 ways to give your eCommerce brand a huge caffeine boost that will make even Google’s eyes bleed.

Remove The Page Clutter
The first step is to do some spring cleaning. It’s time to start decluttering the pages.

Start forensically analysing the page and decide what’s needed – and what’s not.

This means removing everything that isn’t strictly necessary. So remove those flashing lights, fancy animations, social media widgets (use icons instead), and use video very sparingly.

Customers love simplicity. Give them the product, a couple of images, a product description, and a Buy button. That’s it.

They don't need to be told the product's history from the time it left the factory.
Optimise Your Images and Videos

Once you’ve stripped the page down to its zen-like state, it’s then time to start optimising the images and videos.

As we said, use videos only occasionally. And when you do need to use one, make it an MP4 video and no more than 30 seconds. For this, you can run your videos through Handbrake.

Or use YouTube embeds. The benefit of this is that you’ll be promoting your YouTube channel as well.

With images, decide on a specific height and width for each one. You shouldn’t need anything bigger than 1,000px wide.

Then, run the images through TinyPNG or Smush and convert them to a more optimal file format.

Don’t ever upload PNG images unless you need a transparent background. Instead, use JPG. For the best site speeds, use WebP or AVIF.
Lazy-Load Your Images

Usually, a web page doesn't load properly until after all the elements have been loaded, including all
the images. But you can enable something called Lazy Load.

This loads the web page and only loads the images once the site visitor scrolls down to where the image is situated.

If you use WordPress, there are plenty of plugins available. Your site theme may also natively support it.
Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Responsive

As we alluded to in a previous section, you absolutely need to make sure your site is optimised for mobile.

You can make the desktop version of your website “responsive” – this means the desktop website will automatically resize to fit the mobile screen.

The other option is to have an entirely different mobile design altogether, which will kick in when the site detects the size of the mobile screen.

It’s worth obsessing over this. In the US alone, eCommerce shopping on mobile is set to go past 44% - and keep climbing.
Enable a Page Cache

Another way to make a page load faster is to enable a cache.

When someone visits a website for the first time, a cache puts the images into the person’s browser. So the next time the person visits, the images are already preloaded and ready to go.

A cache can be an absolute game-changer, but it can also be an annoyance if you make changes to the site. Your changes may not show immediately. If that’s the case, flushing the cache will clear everything.
Connect to a CDN

If a website’s server is in the United States, and the customer is in, say, Australia, then that’s a long way to go for the page to load.

But what if another server was in Australia? Then, the Australian customer can get the site served to them from the Australian server. This would naturally make it go faster.

That’s what a content distribution network (CDN) does. It sends your website to various international servers, and the site visitor will get the site from the nearest server.

When you’re trying to improve speed optimisation for online stores, this could be the best decision you could make.

The most well-known CDN is Cloudflare, but there are others. All you have to do is Google for them.

Using a CDN will require making changes to your website configuration, so it all goes through the CDN’s servers, not your web host’s.
Reduce The Number of Website Plugins

If you’re using WordPress as your online store platform, then plugins can be a helpful way to add features. But too many plugins can have a detrimental effect on your page speed.

So you need to balance the number of plugins between what’s helpful for your customers and what won’t throttle your site speed. Be selective in the plugins you truly need.
Don't Have So Many Scripts In Your Website Header
This can be seen as a advanced SEO for eCommerce.

Anyways, to make certain website features work, you may be required to place a script inside the header of the website.

But the page won’t load properly till those scripts load, too.

If the scripts are absolutely necessary, put them in your website footer. Then they’ll load last of all.
Upgrade Your Website Provider

Web hosting providers have different plans depending on a customer’s particular needs.

The cheapest plans will have more basic requirements, like less bandwidth and capacity for fewer monthly visitors.

Consider upgrading to a more expensive plan. You’ll get more bandwidth, which means faster speeds and improved eCommerce load times.
Change Your Website Provider

Finally, you may decide that your website provider just isn’t cutting it. If that’s the case, then it may be time to consider switching to another web host.

So many people go to GoDaddy, but they don’t realise that better offers can be found elsewhere. For example, SiteGround is a much more superior service.

They may be more expensive but the speed and uptime make it well worth it.

But it doesn’t have to be SiteGround. There are so many others. Google for possibilities or ask other people for recommendations.

Final Word

If you’re a busy online store owner, you’re likely thinking, “I don’t have time for this.”

But unfortunately, you need to make the time. Site speed for eCommerce SEO can’t be overlooked.

Whether we like it or not, Google holds the power over online stores. If you don’t play by their rules, your store can drop to page 2 of the search results. Otherwise known as No-Man’s Land.

So unless you want to see your revenue dip, now’s the time to feel the need, the need for speed. Sort out your technical SEO here.

Site Speed for eCommerce (10 Must-Know Tips)