Six Ways to Improve Page Load Speed for Your Magento Site

Why Does Page Load Speed Matter?

One of the most important things that you can do to improve your Ecommerce site is to optimize your page load speed. Page load speed is one of the most important metrics that can impact your conversions. By optimizing your page load speed, you can help to improve overall conversions on your site.

Ecommerce sites can no longer think only in terms of desktop online shoppers. Websites need to be optimized for the omnichannel. This includes mobile, tablet, voice, car screens, smart fridge, etc. Anywhere your customers can buy your products is where you need to focus your optimization efforts- so, everywhere.

Page load speed is essential to maintaining your competitive edge in the ecommerce industry. Google recommends TTFB (Time to First Byte) to be 200 millisecond- 1 second is too long. Time to First Byte refers to how long it takes your website to begin to launch, not for the whole page to load. However, acceptable page load speed for content above the fold is less than two seconds. One second page load time is considered excellent. Loading times between two and four seconds are suboptimal, and anything over four seconds needs emergency intervention. Studies show that bounce rate increases significantly as page load times increase. 

Page speed can also impact your search engine rankings. Google definitely looks at your page load speed when ranking pages in SERPs. If your page doesn’t load fast enough for the Google spider when it comes to crawl your page for indexing, then it will move on, and won’t even bother indexing the page at all. This will obviously hurt your SERP rankings significantly.

Therefore, page load speed is probably the single most important thing to optimize. You can think of page load speed as the door that leads to your site. If the door opens too slowly, your customers simply won’t wait until they can get inside. High bounce rates from impatient users lead to decreased sales and conversions. Fortunately, there are several ways to improve page load times on your site. By optimizing your page load time, you can make sure that the door to your site opens quickly for your users. 

There are six tried and true methods to improve your page load speed:

• Signing up with a good web hosting provider.
• Using a CDN to deliver content.
• Utilizing lazy loading in mobile versions of your site.
• Uninstalling irrelevant extensions.
• Enabling caching on your Magento site.
• Resizing your high resolution product images.

By utilizing these methods, you can dramatically improve page load speeds on your website.

You could try to take on these page load time optimizations yourself, but you’ll soon find that these tasks are deceptively difficult or time consuming. Make it easy to optimize your page load time and see improvements fast by signing up for managed services from a certified Magento partner, like Forix. We provide expert strategy and management services to keep your Magento site on top.

Get a Reputable Web Hosting Provider

Dedicated hosting is one of the most important things you can do to speed up your page load time. By choosing a dedicated hosting plan, you can get support on the server site to keep your page load times down. Server configurations are crucial to maintaining strong, secure connections and delivering fast page load times to your users. 

Use a CDN to Deliver Content

A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a strategically placed server that lets you deliver content to your customers closer to where they are. This in turn improves your page load times, as it shortens the time it takes to deliver content to your users. By delivering content to your users from a localized server, you significantly reduce page load times to your users around the world.

Utilize Lazy Loading for Mobile

Lazy loading is another great way to keep page load times down. By enabling lazy loading into your site, especially for mobile iterations, pages are able to load content as the user scrolls down to it, instead of loading everything automatically upon launch. This reduces the page load time initially, and helps to keep load times down as unnecessary content isn’t loaded immediately upon opening the page. 

Uninstall Irrelevant Extensions

Performing an audit of your existing extensions is the first step to this optimization task. You’ll need to identify all of the extensions that are currently installed on your version of Magento. Then, you’ll need to determine which extensions are integral to your business processes, and which are just taking up space. Once you’ve determined which extensions are no longer relevant or necessary, you’ll need to uninstall them, one by one.

Enable Caching

Turning on caching is an easy and fast way to speed up your site. Enabling caching is the simplest method of improving page speed. Of course, caching is only a small part of page speed optimization, and simply enabling caching won’t automatically relieve all of your page load time woes. However, this is an easy solution that can instantly lead to faster page load times for your ecommerce site. 

Resize High Resolution Images

Compressing and condensing your images is another way to reduce your page load times. Images are extremely important, especially to an ecommerce site, which rely on high quality product images to create compelling sales content. However, image files are quite large, and take up a lot of valuable space. Compressing your images into zip files or resizing them to better fit on the page can help to decrease page load time, as there is simply less to load. If you have a large catalog of items, filled with high resolution product images, then this is a crucial optimization project to prioritize. 

Optimize Page Load Speed with Forix

Page load speed optimization is crucial to maintaining fast load times for your website. The importance of having a fast loading website is unquestionable. These are big projects to take on, and you’ll need the help of certified Magento developers to accomplish your Magento speed optimization goals. Turn to the Magento experts at Forix to get your page load times up to speed today.