The speed of internet connection is increasing all over the globe and the patience of visitors is decreasing.
When was the last time you waited 60 seconds for a website to load?
If you are anything like me, probably never!
People just go back and click on another Google result which might belong to your competition.
Optimising your online gift store for speed is very important if you want to sell more gifts in 2020.
According to a study, 47% of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds.
40% of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds.
Here are simple steps of speeding up your gift store.
Want results like this from your online gift store
month after month? Keep reading!
Gift Store’s Speed: The big Ouch!
This is where most of us are losing the game. All of us know that the faster the website loads, the better the customer experience will be.
The faster the website loads, the better Google rankings you will get. The faster website loads, more sales you will get.
But very few of us actually take extra efforts to optimise the website for speed. When we actually do it, we feel that ‘surge’ by witnessing extra sales in our bank account just from this little tweak. Then we never go back!
The problem is, very few online store owners actually go above and beyond to optimise their store for speed.
Some of the simple things you can do to improve the speed of your website are:
- Choose a good hosting server.
Think of the hosting as online space. Just like the offline shop, the online shop should be at the “prime location.”Means, if your customers are, mostly, from India, then choose a hosting provider from Mumbai.
(Did you know that I offer exclusive e-commerce hosting to all of my clients? It’s not some reseller hosting. We have our own servers in Pune. We also offer a handsome deal on AWS and Linode hosting packages.
- Optimising images and hosting videos on YouTube.
You will observe that images and videos make up most of the size of your web-page.
Try Optimole to optimise your images and serve videos from YouTube. This will greatly reduce the load on your hosting and improve the speed of your store.
- Using a CDN like Cloudflare
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It does what it says. It delivers a copy of your online store from the server that is physically closer to their location.
Isn’t this great!
- Optimising the code for faster transfer.
This part might sound a bit techy. Hang on. Don’t run away! You can do this without touching a line of code.
(Alternatively, you can also share this article with your web-developers so that they can help you with this.)
Some of the basic things we can do to optimise the code of your online store are,
- Combining JavaScript and CSS for a coherent transfer.
- Enabling G-Zip and Brotli compression.
- Enabling browser caching.
- Optimising the database of the website.
- Free store speed audit
Do you want to audit the speed of your website? I will show you how to do it. Reputable brands like Google, GTMetrix and Pingdom offers free page-speed audit tools.
Here’s an example of what you can learn by the speed audit. You can click on the images below to zoom in.
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Speed is important. People want instant results. No one likes a slow website.
We have two choices right now. Optimise our online stores for speed or watch customers buy from competitor gift stores.
The choice is ours.
Sounds techy to resolve? Hang on. There is a simple solution to this.
One of the easy ways to implement most of the tweaks on your store is by installing WP-Rocket plugin and by enabling Cloudflare on your site. Also, for more detailed insight, you can check out this WordPress Speed-Up Guide.
That’s it! Everything in the list above is now taken care of.
If you don’t know how to do it and want some help with it, please feel free to schedule a strategy session with me by clicking here. Remember, every day slower version of your website is online, you are losing sales. Don’t lose sales. Book a strategy session NOW.
