You have set up your online store and now you want to increase traffic and focus on conversions. While there are many factors that affect sales, the one overlooked factor is the speed at which your website opens. How can you maximize conversions with page speed?
The following 8 ways will help you increase your conversion rate in no time.
1.Hosting Matters
Website hosting has a direct impact on your site’s performance as it can affect your website completely. When your website crashes are more often, visitors will be less likely to come back. A powerful platform like Shopify can help you manage traffic effortlessly. Its infrastructure is cloud-based, which ensures over 99% uptime. The checkout process and website loading can be much faster too. Your storefront can be loaded approximately 3 times faster and customers can check out at 40% quicker rates.
2.Google Tag Manager
Tracking tags can make it slower for your e-commerce site to open. It is a time-consuming process for developers to constantly maintain and update those. GTM can make it convenient for managing tracking tags. It ensures your tags are condensed into one request call. This request is made asynchronously, which helps your site load faster. You can think about reducing tracking tags to ensure that the user experience is not hampered. This can save you a lot of money and time as well.
3.CDN
When only one server has all the content, the page loads much slower. This is especially true when many people are trying to access your store. You can use a CDN instead to ensure the load is dispersed among many servers. Shopify uses dual-CDNs. These can help you greatly increase the speed at which your store opens. Shopify smartly places the POPs in locations that help you leverage CDNs. Although lesser CDNs are used, they are strategically placed around the world to ensure your online store opens almost instantly.
4.Focus on testing
Testing can help you see problem areas and work on them. A 0.25-second increase in page loading can give you a competitive edge. You can test the page load speed by using GTMetrix. PageSpeed Insights can help you test your site for mobiles and desktops. It will reveal where exactly the problem is and how you can load pages faster. Taking a look at your competitor’s mistakes can help you make wiser decisions. You can then optimize your store’s website accordingly. You can test your site from Pingdom.com which helps you see how you can affect optimization by making certain changes.
5.Quick View
Quick view is one of those features that ensure convenience for your visitor. However, it can make your webpage load slowly. What if only a few customers are using Quick View? In such a case it does not make sense including it in your page. You can check the frequency of Quick View using tools like Hindsight and Sumo which are click mapping tools. You can remove it if you see not many people are using it. Instead, you can use AJAX for obtaining information about the particular product when Quick View is clicked on.
6.Liquid Loops
ShopifyLiquid language is versatile but can cause issues at times. This is true for loops in particular. When it comes to filtering, the loop will go through each product to see whether it meets the criteria. This is what makes the page slow down by several seconds. Findify can help pages load faster even when advanced filtering needs to take place of a large collection of items. You can use values with product options when you are creating a loop.
7.Thumbnails
When thumbnails are being displayed on your website, the image can be bigger than intended. This makes the browser change the size, which takes time. You can use image size parameters provided by Shopify. This ensures that great quality image is displayed while it is the smallest one too. Shopify can automatically change the size of the images depending on the device they are viewed from. You can use the theme to use srcset and Lazy Load.
Your e-commerce site might have many hero-slides. Did you know that even four slides are enough to slow your page loading time? You cannot use smaller images in the slider because that looks bad. You should ideally remove slides or don’t include them on your website. You can use only one image that speaks volumes instead of a series of images. If you must, you can use up to two slides on your e-commerce website.
Shopify can help you increase your sales by aiding you in the process of improving your online store loading speed. You can use the free tools available, and once you start seeing traction, access the paid features to get the most conversions in real time.
