eCommerce: Speed Up Your Website for Best Results!

Let’s face it, almost everybody is in a big tearing hurry these days, and internet users are notoriously impatient; so the faster you can speed up your ecommerce website, the better off you will be!

At this time, speed isn’t a factor with Google when it comes to a website’s search ranking. But that is subject to change without notice and in fact, Google has mentioned adding speed to the overall algorithm.

If Google makes the speed of a website a factor in search ranking, you can bet your bottom dollar that the other search engines will follow.

Visitors to your website will expect your pages to load quickly. If they don’t, you will lose a lot of potential customers as they hit the back button and skedaddle off to greener pastures with speedier websites.

There are various methods of speeding up a slow loading page. Here are a few suggestions from Page Speed, which is an Open Source Project:

• Optimize caching, which includes making sure your styles are in CSS files on the server, not in your page’s code.

• Minimize round-trip times, which means reducing the number of different style sheets and scripts you use, and avoiding redirects whenever possible.

• Minimize request size, which means keeping cookies small and serving static content from a cookie-less domain whenever possible.

• Minimize payload size by compressing scripts and images, and by serving all resources from the same URL every time you use them in your site.

• Optimize browser rendering by using efficient CSS and putting style sheet links in the head of the document.

What is Page Speed?

Page Speed is an Open Source Firefox/Firebug add-on. Both webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate performance on web pages and also to get suggestions on how to improve performance.

Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices as shown above that are known to enhance web page performance.

Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

Check out the FREE service from Page Speed, then put the pedal to the metal and watch your ecommerce website take off!