When selling online, your customers want to trust that they’ll be treated with respect and that their time won’t be wasted. If you don’t impress them the first go-around, most of those shoppers will move on to someone else’s website instead. According to surveys, most consumers never buy from websites they feel dissatisfied with – so make sure yours is a hit!
Page Speed Matters
The biggest reason for customer dissatisfaction is the time it takes to load an online store. The number of choices available in the market means customers expect fast, efficient results when browsing sites and many leave due to slow loading speeds. This can lead to a loss of sales and traffic which you need more than ever in your Big Commerce Store!
Tips to Increase Your Page Load Speed and Revenue
BigCommerce is an eCommerce software provider that prioritizes improving the site speed for its customers’ use. Here are a few tips to take advantage of BigCommerce’s fast online store speeds and improve your website traffic:
- BigCommerce Page and Site Speed Test
- Content Optimization
- Image Optimization
- Redirects
- CDN
- Third-Party Applications
- Google Tags
- JavaScript Errors
- Support from an experienced BigCommerce development agency
BigCommerce Page and Site Speed Test
Page load speed tests are a simple way to analyze the performance of your BigCommerce store, as a site speed test determines which factors affect your site loading time.
The site speed test can also tell if you’re using images with too large file sizes that may be slowing down page load speed. Site and page load speed testing tools include Google Page Speed for free online use for this purpose. In addition, you can find many free online tools.
Content Optimization & Page Load Speed
To improve the speed of your BigCommerce page and store, keep in mind to not overload your site with unnecessary content.
This will only push down the true purpose for its existence – which is selling products! Similarly, limiting how many products and products details are displayed on your homepage can also help increase site loading time.
You can keep your store’s layout organized by having no more than five items per page for better site loading performance and valuable sales. When you organized your store’s layout, it will help your pages or blog posts load faster and your customers can find more details about your products or services.
You can also improve your menus by keeping the number of products shown on each page to a minimum. When there are too many items on your site, it takes longer for pages to load and decreases user experience. Keeping categories simple will help with this as well!
In addition, you should optimize your meta descriptions to increase your organic traffic and revenue. It is one of the most crucial things you should consider.
Image Optimization
To ensure fast load speed, BigCommerce store merchants should keep their images to a reasonable size. The image sizes shouldn’t be excessively large because it could potentially slow down the load speed of your online store’s pages and frustrate customers.
There are some tips that you can follow when setting up a new Bigcommerce page:
BigCommerce, one of the most effective eCommerce platforms, recommends that the width of your images should not exceed 1250 pixels.
It also says dpi is vital because an image being printed has a pixel count of 300, whereas when it’s on BigCommerces site you want to use 72dpi. This will help load speed and prevent loading errors as well.
JPG files are better than PNGs since they have lower file sizes with no loss in quality. Also, responsive images are crucial to increase your organic traffic and conversion rates.
Redirects
As an online store continues to grow, it will undergo many changes. In the beginning stages of growth for this BigCommerce site, new categories and sub-categories have been created that may cause some products to be categorized incorrectly or linked with older communities.
BigCommerce, an eCommerce platform, provides a solution to this problem by automatically redirecting. The great news is it automatically redirects them. However, if you change the category names more than once without clearing out your site’s redirect history, it could result in slower load times for your BigCommerce online store.
A quick and easy way to clean up these trailings is to ask about how many pages are on one single URL address before cleaning them all individually.
This will help decrease page load time which can increase conversions.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
To make your BigCommerce store more efficient, you can use a CDN to deliver static content from global nodes.
The core function of the network is to distribute data across different regions and consumers for increased site speed and efficiency.
For example, if one consumer in Europe visits your site, they will receive their images and other files directly from a nearby data center rather than getting them all through the main data centers that store them; this decreases latency time.
Third-Party Applications
While one of the best eCommerce platforms BigCommerce provides the use of third-party applications to help our online store, it’s important not to overload your site with too many apps.
This will slow download times and may hinder customer experience. BigCommerce offers a ton of applications to increase conversion, but speed suffers the more apps you use. This is because each app requires code that slows load time on your customers’ end.
Some tools such as Pingdom can help you see which apps are hogging your site’s resources, but they may not be the only ones. Before deciding what to do about heavy-hitting sites on your website, consider whether or not their support team is responsive and helpful with resolving issues.
Google Tags
If you’ve been using both old Google Analytics tags (ga) and newer ones like gags, it’s possible the two are being used at once which could cause your analytics to be tracked three times.
If this is happening, clean up any conversion tracking code that uses incompatible tagging systems immediately so conversions aren’t misattributed in reports or ads.
JavaScript Errors
When you notice a problem with JavaScript, there might be an error in the code which could have gone unnoticed. For example, syntax mistakes can cause scripts to not run properly and should be fixed as soon as possible.
Use the following techniques to increase your BigCommerce website’s speed and performance, leading more customers to stay satisfied with their experience. As a result of that happiness, you’ll get increased traffic from Google SEO rankings for this site.
The above-mentioned approaches will assist in increasing your Bigcommerce store traffic as well as lead customers happy together with a system that may cause bringing on additional visitors and also boosting big commerce SEO solutions. SEO is one of the most important components of successful eCommerce sites.
Optimum7 BigCommerce Development Services
At Optimum7, we are committed to providing the best BigCommerce development services that will increase your organic traffic, conversion rates, and business with enterprise-level capabilities and keep customers coming back.
Whether you want us for migration, integration of any application, or need an online store redesigning service; let’s know about your requirements and our team will contact you.
FAQ – BigCommerce Page Speed Optimization
What is a good page speed?
This means that if someone is shopping on your site or BigCommerce store and it takes over two seconds for the category page to load, they will probably leave.
Google wants its search engine results pages (SERPs) loaded in under half a second so users don’t get frustrated or impatient as soon as their desired website doesn’t pop up immediately after typing something into the browser bar.
This online business reasoning has been shown by research conducted at Amazon which showed that there was an increase in eCommerce revenue when products were placed further down the recommendations list because people didn’t want to wait long enough time until those items appeared at top positions.
Why speed optimization is important?
Web pages should be less than 2 seconds to load, or else the user may leave. This means that website developers must ensure their content is easy for search engines to read and index.
It also increases on-site conversions by making it more appealing to both users and search engine crawlers’ demanding speedier sites because faster websites are better at keeping visitors longer.
Does speed affect SEO?
Page speed is important to Bigcommerce SEO because it can affect rankings in both direct and indirect ways. Page speed directly affects your ranking by causing your site’s bounce rate or dwell time – the amount of time visitors spend on a web page before leaving – to increase, which lowers its position on search engines results.
What is the difference between page speed and site speed?
The performance of a specific category page on your online store or blog post is improved by decreasing the load time. It’s similar to site speed, but when focusing on eCommerce website speed you focus specifically on the attributes that make up this one particular aspect of web development and enhance their efficiency.
How do I speed up my page optimization?
There are many things you can do to increase your store and optimized website page loading speed.
Some examples include enabling compression, minifying CSS JS and HTML, reducing redirects, removing render-blocking JavaScript which will help improve the user’s experience by getting rid of long load times.
One way optimized websites reduce their page load time is through leveraging browser caching – when a webpage saves an image or file locally in its cache so it doesn’t have to be downloaded again for future visits.
Another thing that web developers/store owners should keep in mind when trying to increase loading speed would be optimizing images because the image size could also impact site performance positively if done correctly.
Why mobile optimization is important?
Customers are the most important part of your store and many online shoppers. Mobile optimization is crucial to maintaining their satisfaction and trust in you, no matter what devices a customer uses. Satisfied mobile users will be more likely to buy from you or spread good word-of-mouth about your brand!
What is a good mobile page speed?
When considering website performance, it’s important to ensure that your pages load as fast as possible on all devices, (computer or smart device). Even though mobile networks are getting faster and the number of users is increasing, you should always aim for a page loading time under 3 seconds or less than 1-2 if possible.
How can I speed up my BigCommerce store?
There are many ways to optimize your BigCommerce store for speed.
Optimize site load time by using Google’s Page Speed tool
Images are important if images are larger than they need to be or have low resolution. Use alternative image formats like JPEGs instead of PNG for smaller files sizes with similar quality levels.
Fix redirects that may lead users away from the intended page on your BigCommerce store – this will help improve SEO score as well.
Use a CDN (content delivery network) which allows faster download speeds across geographic locations by caching data at multiple data center points within an ISP’s infrastructure around the world depending on how often content changes in order to decrease latency)
Avoid third-party applications to improve your sites speed.
