As soon as your customer reaches the homepage of your website, an invisible stopwatch is activated. With each second that passes by, your customer advances one second closer to abandoning your website and searching elsewhere for what they need. The old saying that time waits for no one means so much more when it is made in reference to online businesses. With a hosted eCommerce shopping cart, however, there are several ways to make each of those seconds count.
Focus on the First Four Seconds
Within the first four seconds, 25 percent of your customers will completely abandon your website if your page doesn’t completely load. Five seconds later that percentage doubles and continues to grow until there are no customers remaining if you get anywhere close to a full minute. Therefore, getting your webpage up and running within the first four seconds is vital. Test the website on your own and time how long each page takes to load, starting with the homepage.
Eliminate Flash Animation
If you have any type of Flash animation throughout your website, the best thing for you to do is to get rid of it. Visually, this animation is very appealing and might seem to be very engaging and attractive to your target market. In reality, though, Flash animation will only lead to further loading delays and complications. It take a considerable amount of time to load all of that – time that you honestly don’t have to spare. Therefore, getting rid of it is the best course of action to take.
Get Rid of Unnecessary Web Pages
Another aspect of reducing your website’s loading time deals directly with the number of web pages that need to be loaded in the first place. The more pages your customers have to navigate through, the more time they spend waiting for pages to load. Therefore, if you can efficiently reflect the content of six pages in three, for example, this is a reduction you should seriously consider. In addition to a drastically reduced number of actual pages, make sure that each of the pages you decide to keep is clean, clear and concise. Excessive clutter and irrelevant content needs to be eliminated from your site all together, because it is not doing anything to help you or your online presence.
Use Analytics to Identify Potential Leaks
One of the biggest advantages of investing in eCommerce shopping cart hosting services like Shopify is that the vast majority of them include access to Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides you with much more than just information about the incoming traffic generated by your website. This type of hosting service will directly connect the actual cart to Google Analytics so that you can clearly identify any potential leaks that might become a problem. Use this online tool to set parameters for your desired goals and expectations. Doing so will make it much easier for you to use these analytical reports to identify your areas of weakness and develop a strategic plan of action which will allow you to resolve them, according to Geek Time.
Make Sure All of the Links Work Regularly
Whether you have one link in your website or one hundred, anything can go wrong that will force them to become ineffective. The content located at the original destination URL used might have been relocated or even deleted all together. The coding within the actual link itself may have been edited or updated incorrectly, resulting in a broken link.
If you allow these technical glitches to accumulate without addressing and resolving them in a timely manner, you will only be placing yourself between a rock and a hard place. That is why it is in your best interests to check all links periodically to prevent this from happening. It is much better for you to find an error within your website and resolve it than it is for your customers to let you know about them through submitting their complaints.
Trust in the Hosted Service Provider
Another effective way to reduce your website’s loading time is to simply trust in the capabilities of your hosted service provider. When it comes to addressing technical glitches and errors, for instance, these are things that your provider should handle with very little effort from your end. Work directly with your provider to find effective ways to reduce loading time and increase the efficiency of your online shopping cart solution in general. These experts and IT specialists have worked with hundreds or even thousands of other websites with similar needs and expectations, so they are the most qualified professionals to guide you towards achieving your goals. Follow their guidance and accept their recommendations in order to get the most value from your eCommerce shopping cart hosting services overall.
