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Why Does Page Load Time Matter In E-Commerce & How To Improve It?

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Every second counts in the eCommerce business! The faster your eCommerce web page loads, the happier the customers. Nobody wants to wait for a website page to load, as customers expect speedy response from an eCommerce website.

Google’s research showed that the chance of a bounce increased by 32% when a page load time went from one to three seconds, and by 90% when the page load time went from one to five seconds. If a site takes up to 10 seconds to load, then the chance of a bounce increases to 123%.

How does slow page speed impact eCommerce business?

Here are five surprising impacts of slow page speed on eCommerce business:

User experience deterioration: The average human attention span has shrunk from 12 to 8 seconds. As a result, visitors will abandon your site if it takes too long to load. It will result in the loss of visitors and potential customers before they explore the eCommerce website for different products.

Increase in bounce rate: The faster the pages of an eCommerce site load, the more are the chances of customers viewing more pages and becoming valuable visitors. Slow page speed compels users to abandon the website, increasing its bounce rate.

Fall in search engine rankings: Google says “we strive to make the whole web faster”.  It means the search engine wants its users to have a fast browsing experience. When websites fail to meet this speed requirement, they cannot get top ranking on search engines.

Dip in traffic: A drop in search engine ranking will inevitably result in a decline in traffic. The lower your website ranks in search engines, the less traffic it receives, which ultimately means fewer customers for your eCommerce business.


Tested ways to improve page load time in eCommerce sites

1) Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution

An excellent hosting solution helps your ecommerce website perform at its very best. It keeps the site up and running smoothly so that your customers never have to wait for a page to load.

It includes a reliable server and inbuilt caching that helps boost your load time and protects the website from all kinds of problems like slow speed, frequent downtime & security breaches. 

Steps to choosing a good hosting solution

Speed: Although website speed is affected by different factors, having a web hosting provider with a fast server, enough memory and processing power is essential for lightning-fast page speed for every eCommerce site.

Security: An eCommerce business should look for these security services provided by hosting service providers like SSL availability, DDoS Attack Mitigation, Malware scanning, firewall protection, uptime, backup, and restore.


Traffic handling capabilities: A reliable hosting services provider should have the ability to cater to 2000-3000 visitors daily.

Support: Please make sure the hosting services provider offers 24/7 monitoring and support for resolving on-site issues and queries.


2) Compress & optimize your images

There are thousands of product images on an eCommerce website. We know HD quality images are essential for attracting customers & boosting sales. But if the image size is large, it can slow down the web page speed and impact the site navigation. The customers will struggle to move from one website category to another and eventually abandon the site due to poor user experience (UX). 

How to fix it? Reducing the quality and size of your images will use less bandwidth and disc space on your site. Your pages will become lighter, the server will communicate with user browsers more quickly, and your on-site content (images & more) will ultimately load faster.

You can use a plugin like WP Smash to optimize and compress images or use software like TinyPNG to reduce the file size of JPEG, PNG and WebP image files. These methods assure less use of bandwidth, and web pages load faster.


3)  Reduce redirects

A redirect is a method of sending both users and search engines to a different URL than they requested. 301, 302 & 303 are the most commonly used redirects. Prominent research says, “Redirects trigger an additional HTTP request-response cycle and delay page rendering.

Each redirect will add a single round trip (HTTP request-response) in the best case. In the worst, it may result in multiple additional round trips to perform the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and TLS negotiation in addition to the additional HTTP request-response cycle.”

In easy words, when a page is redirected to another page, the new page takes some time to load as it has to communicate with the server and load all the data from there. This delay in loading impacts the user experience of that particular website. As a result, you should minimize redirects to improve eCommerce site performance.


4) Cache your web page

Caching is one of the most effective methods for enhancing the speed of your web pages. Caching saves copies of your website's files, reducing the amount of work required for the server to generate and serve a web page to a visitor's browser.

It creates a memory cache for web content, reducing the number of times an external resource needs to be retrieved from a content delivery network (CDN) or another remote server.

The main idea behind web caching is that if you have already visited a particular resource (for example, an HTML file, image or script) on the Internet, then there is no need to fetch it again from the remote server when you want to re-access it.

Instead, grab the cached copy from your local hard drive. This way, the next time the user loads the page, most of the content is already stored locally and the eCommerce website page will load much more quickly.


5) Enable browser caching

About 40%-60% of daily visitors to any website come in with an empty cache. So, when new users visit your website page, it should load quickly enough, so they browse effortlessly through the rest of your website.

Browser caching enables different assets on your website to be downloaded once to your hard drive and saved in a cache or temporary storage space. Those files are now stored locally on your system, allowing subsequent page loads to be faster.

Benefits of browser caching

  • It improves and speeds up browsing
  • It reduces bandwidth consumption
  • It positively impacts the conversion rate
  • It helps protect your privacy


Page load time is a topic many eCommerce website owners are still unaware of. The average visitor to your website won't stay on longer than a few seconds, so having a website that loads too slowly can be a big issue. 

We hope that this blog provided you with some helpful information on page load time and how to improve it. Fynd platform aims to remove the barriers that entrepreneurs face when building an online business.

It provides them with tools to connect with customers anywhere, and deliver exceptional user experience. Learn how to build a blazing fast eCommerce website in 30 minutes , Schedule a free demo or Connect with us today.

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Why Does Page Load Time Matter In E-Commerce & How To Improve It?
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