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About 70% of consumers say page speed affects their decision to shop online.
That is why your ecommerce site speed can make or break your business. Quick page load time equals better website performance and happier customers.
So, let’s explore tried-and-true methods to speed up your site and the best tools to test it. By the end, you will be ready with strategies to make your customers stay, browse, and buy.
Ecommerce site speed optimization is a strategy to make your online store faster and more efficient to capture the interest of search engines and customers. The primary goal is to reduce page load times to improve user experience.
To achieve that, it involves many techniques, including:
With this, you keep visitors engaged, reduce bounce rates, and ultimately increase conversion rates.
There are key performance metrics to help you understand how quickly your pages load and how fast your ecommerce website performs overall.
Here’s a quick overview:
To learn how well your online store performs for these metrics and more, check out the reports provided by Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, WebPageTest. More on how to run a performance audit later in this article.
In a collaborative study with Google, Deloitte found that a mere 0.1s improvement in an Ecommerce store’s load time can lead to better user journey and an increase of 8.4% in conversions and 9.2% in average order value (AOV).
Why does that happen?
Because your website speed and Core Web Vitals directly impact user engagement and satisfaction. Fast load times keep your users happy and engaged and encourage them to explore more products.
In contrast, a slow-loading website frustrates customers and causes them to leave before purchasing. Who wants to buy if they cannot even see the product page, right?
Additionally, your store’s Core Web Vitals affect your SEO since search engines prioritize fast-loading websites. With this, you can get higher search rankings, visibility, and traffic.
While going through this section, think about how each factor impacts your website load time and pinpoint which fixes to tackle first.
The CMS determines how well your site handles traffic, loads content, and responds to user interactions. That’s because modern CMS invests into providing users with native optimizations that apply automatically.
If you choose right based on your business type, you can guarantee to keep users engaged, reduce bounce rates, and improve your search rankings.
To help you with that, here’s an overview of the four most popular CMS for ecommerce websites:
How do they fare against each other in terms of speed and performance?
Shopify offers faster load times and a smoother user experience. Wix performs well but shows slight declines, and BigCommerce is not far behind in terms of stability. Meanwhile, WooCommerce remains steady but less optimized, so it will not provide the fastest site speeds for your online business.
In addition, Shopify has server speed, CDN, and browser caching built-in to make it easier for you to manage your ecommerce site with minimal effort. In contrast, manual setup for these features on platforms like WooCommerce offers more customization and control.
So which is better for you?
This depends on your business needs and size.
For instance, if you have a smaller business, built-in features might be the best choice for simplicity. But if you are scaling, the manual setup allows for better optimization and performance tuning to handle a bigger website with more elements.
Web hosting is where your website lives online. That is why the quality of your hosting provider can spell success or disaster for your ecommerce business.
Faster web hosting means quicker server responses, which improves your site speed and allows it to handle high traffic without a hitch. With this, you can avoid being one of the dreaded slow-loading websites to keep your customers happy and engaged.
The server can retrieve information more efficiently when your site’s pages are organized logically. In contrast, a messy structure makes the server work harder, slowing your site and frustrating visitors.
Additionally, avoid website design mistakes like complicated checkout and confusing UX. Reduce unnecessary elements and code to simplify navigation and layout. Less site clutter provides a smoother experience that attracts potential customers.
Site architecture is especially critical if you are combining multiple business ideas into one store. For example, let’s say you sell online courses, art, and digital products like eBooks. A clear structure with dedicated sections for each offer makes your site more logical for easy data retrieval. Plus, its streamlined setup also helps simplify the coding, making your site faster.
Third-party plugins and apps add useful features to ecommerce websites, but each of them has extra code and requests, which increases your loading time. Too many integrations can clog your site, making it sluggish, unresponsive, and frustrating for users.
So, to keep your site running smoothly, choose only essential plugins and consistently review their performance. You also have to make sure you have the newest versions and update the software as needed.
Take notes of the practical points, review them, and assess their relevance to your current website performance.
A CDN is a group of servers spread across different global locations. It stores copies of your website's content on these servers so users can access the data from the server closest to them.
This shortens the journey your data takes to get your content to your audience as fast as possible.
In addition, a CDN helps distribute traffic and reduce server load. With this, your online store stays fast and responsive even during high-traffic periods. Plus, a good CDN can lower your bounce rates while increasing your conversion rate with the 1 to 2-second load time difference.
How do you choose the best one for you?
Consider factors like:
To get a headstart, look into popular CDN providers Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront since they are known for those factors.
A reliable and scalable hosting provider guarantees your site can handle traffic spikes without crashing. Additionally, it lets you grow your website with more products or pages as you grow your ecommerce brand. It also minimizes downtime to make sure your site is accessible most, if not all, of the time.
To help you further, here are 3 strategies you can do to optimize hosting and avoid crashes during high-traffic periods:
How do you implement all these strategies?
Choose the right web host for your site, one that can do all that and more. If the process or jargon becomes too technical, consider getting a software developer with expertise in eCommerce platforms. They can use their expertise to help you choose the one with the ideal server infrastructure.
Core Web Vitals is what Google uses to assess your website’s user experience. They focus on:
Together, the three most important Core Web Vitals metrics represent how users perceive your webpage’s quality.
But how do you improve Core Web Vitals?
Apply effective Core Web Vitals strategies:
In addition, you should separate the front-end and back-end operations to let the former load independently. With that, you can make your pages load faster and be more responsive. You should also apply this to simplify updates and maintenance since any changes to the user interface will not affect back-end operations.
To further improve your Core Web Vitals, you have to minimize performance impacts from plugins:
Reduce your image file sizes without compromising quality. But how do you do this?
4.1. Apply image compression techniques
First is the lossy compression technique, which removes some image data to reduce file size. You can apply this if you have a lot of product photos. Use TinyPNG and Optimizilla to do this.
Alternatively, you can do lossless compression to not lose any image data. Leverage this for your logos, main product images, or if you have a graphic-driven business. For this, Short Pixel is a useful tool to maintain your image’s quality.
Here’s the difference between lossy and lossless images:
4.2. Choose the right image format
The right image format can dramatically reduce your image file sizes. However, not all formats are created equal. Some support better transparency and quality than others, which impacts how your site photos appear.
Here’s an overview of each format to help you decide:
So why is transparency a big pro?
It allows parts of your image to be see-through, which is essential for logos, icons, and design elements that need to blend smoothly with various backgrounds.
So, if you are graphic-driven, PNG or WebP is ideal for you. However, if you are an ecommerce brand with hundreds to thousands of product photos, JPEG will be enough for you.
But the one that will give you the best quality without slowing your site is WebP.
To apply this format, you can do it manually or get NitroPack. Our service automatically converts your images to WebP for better performance. Plus, we keep the original image as a backup and use it if a browser doesn’t support WebP.
4.3. Implement lazy loading
Lazy loading delays the loading of your images until they are needed to speed up your site's initial load time. You should use this to let your users interact with your content right away without waiting for all images to load.
This can reduce bounce rates and average page speed. It can also help mobile users with slower data connections. Users who browse long pages with many images, like blog posts or product catalogs, also greatly benefit from this.
To implement this, here are 2 options:
Regardless of your choice, this tactic can create a smoother user experience and increase conversion rates.
Each HTTP request adds load time, making ecommerce sites with heavy content prey to slower load times. So, how do you minimize these requests?
5.1. Combine CSS & JavaScript files
Merge your multiple individual CSS and JavaScript files into 1 larger file to reduce the number of HTTP requests your site makes. Fewer requests mean less strain on your server and faster content delivery to users.
5.2. Use CSS sprites for icons & small images
CSS sprites combine multiple images into a single file like this:
You can leverage this clever technique to make your site load only 1 image instead of multiple files. This is especially useful when you have numerous small images, such as icons, buttons, and logos, that are repeatedly used across your site.
To do this, use Toptal’s CSS Sprite Generator. Simply upload your files, and the generator will give you the downloadable sprite version in seconds.
5.3. Reduce your plugins & widgets
Audit your plugins at least once a month to see if they are still needed for your site. Too many can bog it down. To do this, review each plugin’s usage and performance.
So check your site's loading speed and functionality with each plugin activated, then deactivate one at a time to identify any that aren't necessary. You should also look for alternatives that combine multiple functions into one plugin to reduce the total number needed.
For example, Nitropack offers caching capabilities, image optimization features, built-in CDN, code minification, and more. Lastly, make sure all your remaining plugins are up-to-date to maintain security and performance.
When your site stores copies of files on the users’ devices, that is browser caching. Then, when those users revisit your site, the browser loads these cached files instead of requesting from the server again.
What content types should you cache? Static content like:
They are frequently used elements that don't change often, reducing the need for repeated requests and saving bandwidth.
To set up, you can use the .htaccess file to add directives like ExpiresActive On and specify how long different types of content should be cached. For example, ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year" tells the browser to cache JPEG images for one year.
If you prefer an easier method, let NitroPack’s caching tool do the heavy lifting. Just turn on “Cache Warmup,” and all the caching happens automatically in the background to optimize your site without manual effort.
Minify or remove unnecessary characters from code—like spaces, comments, and line breaks—without changing its functionality. This is key for improving site speed because it shrinks file sizes, allowing your store to run faster.
How do you do this?
Tools like UglifyJS for JavaScript and CSSNano can strip out all the extra characters, making your files as lean as possible. But to make it easier on you, NitroPack applies minification and compression on your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML automatically.
Plus, it uses AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) trees to simplify the code by breaking it down into fundamental components. This helps make the code as small and stable as possible.
Our “Minify Resources” is usually enabled by default. But if you need to check or change it, go to your NitroPack dashboard, then navigate to Cache Settings > Cache.
AMP uses a stripped-down HTML version to load your pages faster on mobile devices. It gives you a competitive edge against slow websites.
In addition, AMP can help your mobile users reduce data usage while giving them the best online shopping experience. Plus, Google prioritizes AMP pages, so you can use this to rank higher and drive more organic traffic to your site.
To implement AMP, you can start with a few pages first to test its impact on your site. Identify the ones that will benefit the most, like product and landing pages. They attract the most traffic and are key points where users make purchasing decisions, so faster mobile site speed can increase engagement and conversion rates.
If you want to dig deeper, use Google Analytics to find the most viewed pages. Simply navigate to "Reports," then click on "Engagement," and choose "Pages and Screens." Then, you will see the views of each page.
Once that is done, you can implement AMP. Here’s how:
If you are not in WordPress, setting up AMP requires coding. Here’s a snippet of the AMP markup:
If you do not have the technical expertise, it is best to get an expert to not make any critical mistakes. With this, you can make sure your business ideas flourish instead of being bogged down by avoidable tech issues that make users leave your page.
Organize and maintain your database to guarantee fast data retrieval and minimal downtime in your ecommerce website performance. To do this, remove unnecessary data like old records and duplicate entries.
Use phpMyAdmin and import your data there following these steps:
Once that is done, you can go to your account and click on databases:
Then, click the database you want to optimize, check all tables, and select “Optimize table:”
You can schedule these cleanups regularly once a month, to prevent your database from getting cluttered.
Additionally, use efficient queries and indexing. The former retrieves data quickly without overloading the server. Meanwhile, indexing helps speed up data retrieval by creating a roadmap for the database to follow, making searches faster.
So write queries that fetch only the data you need, avoiding SELECT * statements. Here’s an example of what your SQL code should look like:
To create an index, identify the columns used frequently in search queries and apply the CREATE INDEX command in your SQL editor.
Browser prefetching anticipates and loads data before a user needs them. It helps reduce the long wait times needed to fetch data from memory.
Here are its 2 types:
To apply link prefetching, use link rel=prefetch. Here’s an example:
This instructs the browser to load the content of "https://yourstore.com/products/blue-t-shirt" in advance.
For DNS prefetching, add a simple line of code to your HTML like this:
Use it to tell the browser to resolve the domain name stellarshop.com before the user clicks on any links to that domain.
With prefetching, you create a better shopping experience that encourages users to complete purchases.
Server response time is the time it takes a server to respond to a user's request. Search engines care about this a lot; ideally, your server response time should be under 200 milliseconds to keep users and Google happy.
One effective way to reduce server response time is to optimize your backend code. Review it for inefficiencies and redundant processes like overly complex database queries. Tools like PHP CodeSniffer or ESLint for JavaScript can help you identify areas for improvement.
Additionally, upgrade your server hardware. Contact your site hosting provider to talk about their solutions that let you have a faster CPU and more RAM and SSD storage. You can also ask if you can pay for a dedicated server or VPS (Virtual Private Server).
Another option is to use a CDN to reduce the load time, which we discussed earlier. Then, you can monitor your server performance through GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Set a limit on key aspects like page size, load times, and HTTP requests to set up your web performance budget. Use this to achieve realistic performance goals, catch issues early, and adjust as needed moving forward.
How do you do this?
We have a step-by-step guide for your web performance budget. But to give you an overview, the first step is to list your competitors to:
You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights to analyze their home, product, feature, and blog pages. Aim to be at least 20% better than your competitors. For instance, if your competitor's homepage loads in 3 seconds, aim to have your load in 2.4 seconds.
Next, create your web performance baseline. Use WebPageTest since it provides stable data about your site's speed and functionality. But make sure to clear your browser’s cache before testing.
Once you have your data, use the Performance Budget Calculator to calculate budgets. Then, it is time to implement your budget, but it is best to let an expert handle this since it involves coding and technical configuration.
As you go through these, take note of their main features and review them with your team to help you decide which tools you should use.
PageSpeed Insights is one of the best free tools to measure your site’s performance. Its speed tests let you identify areas of your site that need improvement. Use it to get specific suggestions like this:
Additionally, it shows you how much time you can save on your core web vitals. You can use these diagnostics as a guide on what specific steps you can take to make your site faster.
To use PageSpeed, go to its website and copy the URL you want to test. You do not need to create an account.
GTMetrix offers key metrics, including Page Load Time, Total Page Size, and the number of requests. It is best for historical data tracking since you can monitor a URL daily, weekly, and monthly. Then, you can set conditions for email alerts like this:
Use this to know immediately if your site starts slowing down and can take action to fix it. Additionally, it offers a waterfall breakdown, which is a detailed visual representation of how a web page loads over time. It displays each page element, like images, scripts, and stylesheets, and shows the loading process’ order and duration.
Pingdom provides key metrics like uptime, page load time, and performance grades. Just like the other 2, it provides detailed reports on what you can fix to make your site run smoother.
But what sets Pingdom apart is its real-time monitoring and alerts. You can set up notifications for issues like high page load times or downtime, Then, use the alerts to address problems ASAP.
NitroPack stands out because it goes beyond the basics. It removes the need to tap multiple platforms to do one specific task. With us, you can get image optimization, code minification, and a built-in global CDN.
Additionally, we offer a Test Mode to let you try out features without disrupting your visitor’s experience with site downtime. NitroPack can also be used with other plugins like WooCommerce.
More importantly, our product is user-friendly. You do not have to be stressed about coding and making mistakes. Our automation features will handle everything to optimize your site 365 days a year and 24/7.
Lastly, our free plan never expires. You have long-term access to make sure your site is always running smoothly without any commitment.
Speed is your secret weapon for your online business success. So, test your ecommerce site speed already with one of the 3 tools we discussed to find bottlenecks. Then, talk to an expert and your team to decide which tactic you can apply first.
But remember, your site speed optimization is an ongoing process. Review the results after trying these tactics and tweak things as needed to stay competitive.
Lora has 7+ years of experience developing in-depth, specialized content for SaaS companies in the CEE region. She has sourced and collaborated with subject-matter experts on site speed optimization for WordPress, Core Web Vitals, and the future of web performance. "If you can't explain it to a 7-year-old, you've not researched it well enough" is Lora's guiding principle when publishing professional insight for complex technical topics.
