Slower than expected site load speeds negatively affect user experience. Especially on mobile devices where fast sites are taken for granted these days. For eCommerce websites, load speed can be critical. Slow sites can cost potential customers and orders. There may also be other effects. For example, SEO rankings now take page load speed into consideration for organic and paid ads positioning.
If you have tested your site with a tool such as PageSpeed or WebPageTest, the report would have come back with a list of issues and suggestions for improvement.
There are several variables that can make a difference to how fast your Customer Self Service eCommerce Platform website loads. In a nutshell, most will be related to file size, storage space, and the amount of information that the server needs to send to each user. We have broken up to:
- CSS and JavaScript use
- Content (e.g., many banners, media not optimised for online)
- Customisation complexity
- Background tasks
Some of these are in your control. Others may require technical analysis and expertise.
CSS and JavaScript use
If you run your site through a page speed tool, it is likely that at the top of the list of suggestions is something like 'Eliminate Render-blocking Resources'.
For your website, render-blocking resources will typically refer to uses of CSS but especially JavaScript. Such coding is part and parcel of how web page content is created. Web page styling and functionality would not be the same without them. Especially dynamic content. However, bear in mind that your visitors' browsers have to process each CSS and JavaScript request before a page will load fully. When a browser normally finds CSS or JavaScript <script> tags, it will stop loading HTML until the scripts have been loaded and executed (or just executed). This slows down the overall page render time.
So one of the most beneficial things you can do is to ensure your styles and (especially) scripts follow page load efficiency practices and utilise the tools your Customer Self Service eCommerce Platform has to help achieve this.
What you can do:
- Ensure your custom styles and scripts have been written to best coding practices:
- Efficient coding with no unnecessary elements
- Do not use too many widgets and independent scripts on the one page
- Utilise the Scripts and styles function in the CMS where possible instead of uploading each JavaScript and referencing it in a HTML Snippet widget. Scripts and styles has been designed to maximise efficiency by:
- bundling related scripts and styles into one widget, so be called as a unit instead of multiple units,
- loading multiple Scripts and Style widgets to operate independently on a page,
- allowing you to disable unneeded scripts and styles by easily turning them off (just tick the checkbox next to the widget in the page layout).
What else you can do:
- Book a time with Commerce Vision's Professional Services to discuss what we can do to help.
- We can also implement features/offer services we have specially created to target JavaScript render-blocking on your web pages so that they appear more quickly to users.
- Our JavaScript Defer feature/service defers JavaScript loading and execution (including inline script blocks) until the HTML has been parsed on a page. The solution uses our expertise to defer in an orderly way (For versions 4.17+)
- Our JavaScript Dependency feature/service reduces JavaScript execution to only those a particular page needs. The solution automatically works out what JavaScript files are necessary, bundles them and provides a single link to the browser to lower resource use. (For version 4.25+)
Content Creation
Think about the content on your pages, especially high traffic pages. TIP - The home page should be priority since it is usually the first page for visitors.
What you can do:
- Ensure images and other rich media are optimised for online use as they load faster and require less bandwidth.
- Consider the number of banners loading on the one page, e.g., campaign banners. As these are usually image-based, having too many campaigns on your webpage can slow down page loads. TIP - Check the page load speed before and after adding a campaign.
- Minimise hotlinking. This is where web pages on other servers (yours or those from other sites) are linking to your web page's content.
What else you can do
Ensure Lazy Loading is enabled. The Lazy Loading feature ensures that the loading of non-critical files are delayed until they are in view (on screen). Here's an example of how it works. Suppose your home page has a slider campaign. Not all slides are currently viewable on your visitors' screen. With lazy loading enabled, media files will not be loaded until the user can see them. This allows non-critical files to be delayed until needed.
- Lazy loading is enabled by default for all websites. If you think lazy loading is not on for your site, please contact Commerce Vision Support.
Summary
There's quite a bit your eCommerce team can do to help increase page load speeds. If you require further assistance than this, book a Professional Services consultation to assess and implement additional measures.
