Choosing the Right Payment Gateway for Your E-commerce Store
Contents1 Popular Payment Gateways in Australia1.1 A Word of Caution: Australia Post Payment Gateway2 Making the Right Choice3 Planning to…
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So, you’ve launched your first website, or you’ve probably revamped your old website and published it again. With all the indexing and SEO integrations completed, you probably are expecting tons of traffic flocking right to your amazing home page and see what special you’ve to offer?
But things don’t go as planned. Even if you do get decent traffic visits, you observe that the bounce rate is just too high, something not ideal if you really want to get some real customers streaming down that funnel.
More often than not, your website is just taking a wee bit more time than ideal, and with the attention spans people have in current times, they have already closed your website and moved on to the next link. What’s the point in spending all your time and effort in making the perfect website if people are not even getting to see what it has to offer?
It is the time it takes for the visitor to see any content once they land on a web page.
According to Google Developers and Google Search Central, the ideal time for a web page to load is less than half a second, i.e., the page load time shouldn’t exceed 0.5 seconds. If you have an ecommerce store, then this threshold increases to 2 seconds, give or take 0.5 seconds.
It’s not all black and white. There are 2 practical factors that come into play when it comes to web page speed or page load time:
There are several ways in which you can do so. Some reliable and easy ones are:
Is that all there is to it when it comes to web page speed? No, not really. If you want to delve deeper, page load time is further categorised into 2 types.
As the name hints, First Contentful Paint (FCP) is nothing but the time it takes for the visitor to see the very first piece of content on the web page once they land there.
You must have come across this type a lot when you see some of the elements loading a little sooner than others when you visit a web page.
Simply put, DOMContent Loaded (DCL) is the time it takes for a website to load completely, which means each and every pixel, data, and bit from top to bottom of the web page. It’s basically FCP followed by everything else.
One recent study highlighted these findings:
Another simple way to decrease your page load time is to add a CDN to your website. Let’s explore what it is in the first place, how it works, and how you can add it to your website.
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It is a distributed network and also a storage service that hosts your website’s content instead of your servers doing so, hence reducing your servers’ traffic load and increasing the time it takes for your website to load.
That said, it also functions as a proxy between you and your visitors by providing services such as automatic HTTPS, firewalls, load balancing, and redundancy in the event that your origin servers are offline.
As mentioned before, CDNs unburden your servers by shifting traffic from them. Not only this, they’re also speed-optimised and performance efficient, something that Google highly appreciates for better SEO rankings. Moreover, CDNs have widely distributed centres across the world, making your website easily and quickly accessible to users anywhere. This goes a long way in reducing potential downtime users face because of a server going down.
A CDN is made up of many data centres located throughout the world–known as points of presence or PoPs. Each PoP has the ability to host and serve content to users. Users are routed to certain PoPs via CDNs depending on a variety of parameters, such as availability of the PoP, speed of the connection, and distance.
Being the proxy between your origin server and your users, a CDN has your website content cached, such as multimedia, images, HTML pages, style sheets, et al. It furnishes these to the visitors of your website. But how is this data transferred? It’s done either through pushing or pulling.
You can select the best CDN for you upon considering these factors:
How you add a CDN to your website would highly depend on where your website is hosted and how it is hosted. Here are some ways to add a CDN to your website:
All of this might seem a lot but when you actually implement this, adding a CDN is really not that hard, we promise. You can explore the internet to delve deeper to know the detailed steps you need to implement to add a CDN to your website.
Yet another way to load your web pages faster is optimising images, which means decreasing their file size. This can also be done using dedicated plugins or scripts, which helps reduce the page load time of your website. There are two methods generally used for compression: lossy and lossless. You need to choose the right file format, medium compression rate, and the right tools to achieve this.
Rather than uploading a heavy loading MP4 video file direct to your website, it is a much better option to embed the video. Most common mediums to use is YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook. Most website CMS platforms such as Elementor and Divi have elements to even a novice to embed their videos easily. Don’t forget to think about placement of your video to ensure ease for the reader.
Though you can follow Google’s recommendations and aim for a 0.5 second or a 1 second page load time, but let’s face it, this is not possible to achieve in all situations. Does this mean that your website performance is poor if it takes 1.2 seconds to load, or it’s supposed to be great if it takes a mere 0.3 seconds to load? The answer is: Not at all.
If your website has basic HTML pages then it’s easy for them to load in 0.1 seconds, that doesn’t mean it would appeal to visitors or be of any use to you. On the other hand, an ecommerce website may take 2.5 seconds to load everything but it might provide high value to its clients through its user-friendly experience afterwards and unmatched products it offers.
When all is said and done, just keep one thumb rule in mind: of course it’s ideal to keep the page load time as minimum as possible, but on the other hand, aim for a page load time of less than 3 seconds as the upper limit, which is the average time taken for a relaxed breath.
It’s logical that even if your website doesn’t open in the blink of an eye, that should be completely fine, but it doesn’t mean at all that it can take its own sweet time to make an appearance in front of your prospective customer, like 7 or 10 seconds. That’s definitely not ideal at all and should be avoided at all costs.
All our website builds have the website speed optimised after going live.
