According to MachMetrics, as little as a 1-second delay in page load time can reduce eCommerce conversions by seven% – and that can amount to significant lost revenue!
Plus, 2018 Google research showed that over l% of spider web traffic comes from mobile devices, yet mobile conversion rates are lower in comparison to desktop rates. What's the deal?
Well, the average mobile site takes 15 seconds to load, for 1 thing. Now, consider the probability of bounce every bit load times increase:
But, although mobile-showtime design is increasing in importance, it's not just mobile sites that are afflicted; Google also determined that in general, excessive site elements like text, titles, and images reduce the probability of conversion past over 90%!
The fact is, as a guild, we are fast-moving and efficiency-focused. Customers don't desire to look, specially when there are other sites they could be doing business with. The more streamlined and efficient your site is, the better the user experience will be, resulting in higher sales, more client loyalty, more than brand awareness, and ultimately – more than growth.
Even if you lot've fine-tuned your digital product website, in that location might be improvements you haven't idea of, or additional ways to fully optimize the feel for your customers. At the end of the day, improving your site performance can only benefit your business!
With this in mind, let's have a look at some of the ways you can improve site performance for your digital product shop.
1. Optimize your hosting and storage
Hosting and storage underlie everything you do, from serving up content to digitally delivering your products; put but, they are crucial for the success of any digital store – but especially when it comes to digital products.
If you desire to spruce up your site performance, optimizing your hosting is a good place to start. Using a managed WordPress host is ideal if you run your site on WordPress, only more by and large speaking, skilful reliability and speed are important factors when choosing a host.
Every bit a digital production seller, yous might not think location matters much – after all, digital products tin can be purchased from pretty much anywhere, correct? Fifty-fifty if that's truthful, there are yet advantages to optimizing server locations according to your chief demographics. For instance, if the bulk of your customers are from the USA, it might make sense to choose a server that's as well in the USA.
Additionally, you might decide to use a content delivery network (or CDN), which delivers assets (such as images, scripts, or generally larger files that take longer to load) via servers in the closest location to the individual customer / user, fifty-fifty if your main server is in a different location.
In many cases, digital product shop owners use services like Amazon S3 to deliver files, especially if the products have a larger file size (as is the case with things like videos, sound, images, and creative projection files, for example).
With digital products, the potential for rapid vertical scalability is so not bad that things similar storage limitations can really make it the fashion, impacting site performance as the extra burden placed on your server slows things down for your users.
To recap, here are the top tips for optimizing your hosting and storage:
- Utilise a managed WP host
- Utilise a host that's reliable and fast
- Choose a server that's near your primary demographic
- Use a CDN to deliver avails locally
- Utilize cloud storage services like Amazon S3 to deliver your digital products
ii. Apply a lightweight theme
Themes can add together a surprising amount of bloat to your site code, resulting in more queries and more information to exist parsed before content is delivered to the user. In the end, some additional load time (and possibly even lost sales) might not be worth the exciting bells and whistles that some themes annunciate.
When choosing a theme for your digital product shop, be sure to look for ones that are lightweight and "bloat-free", avoiding any extra elements that are known to detract from conversions, such as moving sliders, animated elements, etc. It'southward also worth mentioning that equally Google moves toward mobile-first indexing, more than minimal designs that are optimized for speed will go along to be favored by search engines.
3. Minimize plugins
Minimizing plugins not only improves site operation; it also helps to reduce site security risks every bit well. Though there are plugins specifically designed for site performance, as a general philosophy, less is more!
Consider disabling unused plugins, switching to lighter-weight plugins, or removing plugins that are not absolutely essential (or plugins and plugin settings that are known for loftier CPU usage). Tools similar GTMetrix tin can requite you these kinds of insights, plus data on things like Google Page Speed, page load time, and other analytics.
iv. Compress your images
According to Google, "25% of pages could relieve more than 250KB and 10% tin salvage more than than 1MB" by compressing images and text. When information technology comes to epitome file size vs. quality, there's a happy medium to be found; it may accept some trial and fault, but don't exist afraid to experiment to come across what if you can retain equally much image quality as possible, while optimizing your images for fast-loading web display.
If you're non sure where to start, here are some standard all-time practices:
- Use PNG or SVG files for logos
- Utilize JPEG files for production images (try 70% compression)
- Scale images for their intended use; don't utilize bigger image dimensions than what'due south needed
- Use tools like TinyPNG to shrink your original, high-resolution images (photos, illustrations, etc.)
5. Apply caching
In the most basic terms, caching streamlines the process of delivering content. More specifically, when someone visits your website, a query (or request for content) is sent to your server – merely, using caching can save your server a lot of resources, especially if a lot of people are visiting your store and viewing your content.
Caching plugins like WP Rocket essentially clarify your posts and pages, turning them into static HTML files, which are so delivered much faster. This can make a huge divergence to your site visitors!
6. Embrace mobile optimization
Mobile commerce is projected to account for over 50% of eCommerce sales by 2021! Needless to say optimizing your digital product store for mobile use is becoming increasingly necessary, and it's an important part of improving site performance, too!
The need for speed
Efficiency will go on to be required in order to compete on the eCommerce playing field – and while improving site operation can be an ongoing job as trends and technologies change, you lot can refer to these tips to go started.
Audit your current site to see if you've already applied some of the methods mentioned, and find out what still needs to be addressed. There are quite a few tools and resources available to aid you along the way; Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights, and YSlow, to name a few!
What has made the biggest difference to your own site functioning? What tips and tricks do you have to share? Nosotros'd love to hear your thoughts, so drop us a comment below!
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