Your eCommerce website needs to be fast; the speed of operation is critical in the digital world. How quickly your site loads is not only a convenience for your audience but it also determines how well ranked your website will be in search engines. This is so for the reason that a website low in loading speed will result in user experience unsatisfactory, engagement reduced and high bouncing rate on top of other negative consequences to your SEO.
In this article, we will discuss why page speed plays such a crucial role in eCommerce SEO and provide some useful optimization tips. If you intend to optimize your site yourself or intend to opt for eCommerce SEO services India, page speed must be the first thing of your concern. In this article, we will discuss the concept of page speed and how it affects eCommerce SEO.
Robust Impact of Page Speed on eCommerce SEO
In terms of your site’s ranking, Google takes into account many factors like the quality of content, its relevance and user experience. In the last few years, page speed has been one of the most important aspects to decide overall user experience. As slow loading speeds shorten user’s patience and increases bounce rates for them. This, on the other hand may adversely affect your search engine ranking.
Additionally, it also includes page speed as a search ranking factor when searching on desktops and mobiles. In this respect, it is imperative that the website be designed to load quickly especially now that there has been an increase in mobile technology usage.
Page speed is of utmost importance considering the fact that mobile users are on the go as compared to their counterparts using desktop computers. It’s important for business owners to optimize their sites for page speed because:
Better user experience:
Users tend to spend more time on a fast-loading website, interacting with its content, as well as performing what they want with it. Conversely, a slow site has high bounce ratings, low engagement, and eventually leads to loss of conversion and revenues. So, when it comes to deciding the eCommerce SEO packages budget, investing in page speed optimization will have a significant ROI.
Increased crawl rate:
Google relies on bots that crawl web pages and collect data with a view to establishing ranks of various websites. Each bot only has a certain amount of time to crawl each page, so if your pages load too slow, it could mean that these bots will miss some of your content. In addition, Google will not have sufficient knowledge to determine whether the content on the page is relevant for the searcher.
Better search engine ranking:
Remember that it has been noted that page speed acts as one of the ranking parameters in Google’s algorithm. Therefore, you will be able to get higher positions of the rank of various search engines because of the speed with which your site loads. This will also lead to more visits by users to your website and increase possibilities for conversion. Robust speed optimization tips for Ecommerce businesses:
Better resource management:
To make a headway in increasing your page speed, start by looking at all the webpage items you have. This includes images, clips, CSS files and JavaScripts. They must be compressed and optimized for web use. It would take a considerable amount of time for large, uncompressed files to load into your website. In addition, you could also make use of the content delivery network (CDN) and divide your website’s resources in various servers so that the load time would be shorter.
Minimize HTTP requests:
Whenever a user browses your website, their browser places an HTTP request that is duly responded to with relevant files loaded. Your page will take longer to load as you send more requests. Combine several CSS files in order to minimize the number of these requests or use a single sprite for images. This minimizes the HTTP requests thereby aiding in page speed. Besides, you can make use of browsers storing these resources locally in order to avoid more requests within an HTTP.
Utilize caching:
Caching involves the temporary storing of those data requested regularly so as not to be requested each and every time. Caching could greatly reduce the loading time of your website. Browser caching is one technique you can employ whereby the resources are kept in the user’s device for a specified duration. However, the other kind of caching is referred to as server-side caching and it saves its resources on the server itself so as to reduce the response time. You can similarly control what elements are cached via utilizing caching plugins.
Optimize images:
Images are a vital component of every e-commerce site, but their contribution to slowing down the sites’ loading speeds cannot be ignored. There are other tools that will allow you to compress your photos without affecting their quality. Besides that, think about implementing lazy loading strategies that load images as the user reaches them rather than simultaneously. Optimize the images and use image sprites (CSS) to combine different images into one file that will load only once.
Minimize redirects:
Every time a user is redirected from one page to the next, this adds up a new HTTP request which increases loading time. Try to avoid using any kind of redirects since they will lower your website’s performance. Ensure that they are well implemented and only include those that are essential with a view of preventing unnecessary requests. Carry out a thorough check of your site to locate and rectify faulty or wrongly redirected links.
Improve server response time:
It does not only depend on a customer’ connection but it also includes the server response time. Load time would be greatly affected if your server takes longer to respond. Optimizing database queries, using CDN and providing your host with sufficient resources are all the ways through which you can try improving the server response time.
To summarize, page speed is a vital element of eCommerce SEO, and by adopting these techniques, your site will be highly improved in terms of performance. This helps in increasing page load speed of the website hence leading to improved user experience, higher search engine ranking and increased conversions. With time, Google, and other search engines will prioritize page speed. Therefore, e-commerce should maintain pace with the times by making sure that its sites are optimized for easy navigation.
