Top Tips for Boosting the Performance of your E-Commerce Store

For many e-commerce merchants who are desirous to provide an integrated shopping experience for their customers, it is hugely important they explore all ways to boost the performance of their e-commerce stores. No matter the size of the store, if you want to remain relevant and competitive with satisfied customers, optimizing your store for service delivery must be paramount. These here top tips have the power to help you convert your e-commerce store, no matter its size from just another ordinary online shop into an efficient, productive and high performance online business entity. Here’s what needs to be done:

Pick the Right Hosting Solution

The performance of your e-commerce store relies heavily on the hosting solution you select to host your website. Make sure to select a high-performance server, security and customer service oriented hosting provider. This is the type of hosting solution that can help out your store when it gets simple traffic spikes preventing it from slowing down almost to a crawl or even stopping completely.

Optimize Images for Faster Loading Times

The sizes of onsite images do affect the loading speed of websites. Slow loading images in your e-commerce store can lead to a slow user experience, high bounce rate and lower sales. To compress your images to the right sizes and enhance the loading speed of your website, you can use an image optimization tool. This tool can help you lower the file size of images while still maintaining their quality. You may also choose to use the lazy loading technique to use images only when in the view-port on your site. This benefits the bandwidth of the site even more.

Optimize Your Database

A well-optimized database can be really beneficial to the performance of your e-commerce store. To keep your website effective and running smoothly, you must periodically clean up the database. This you do by deleting old information like expired coupons, abandoned carts and logs. If you so decide, you can also leverage database optimization tools and techniques such as indexing, query optimization etc. to ensure your database runs as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Enhance Mobile Responsiveness

With increasing use of mobile devices by online shoppers, mobile commerce is becoming more important now than ever before. To take advantage of this scenario, your website must be optimized for mobile devices. It must be sufficiently mobile-friendly to enhance the experience of your customers. You must therefore endeavor to ensure the website adheres to responsive design guidelines for a smooth shopping process on all the devices. Ensure the website is quick and easy to navigate on many different mobile devices. That helps it to give the best experience to your customers.

Improve Site Search Functionality

Search functionality can improve user experience on your e-commerce store a great deal. To enhance the search functionality of your website, you can add smarter search capabilities like autocompletes, faceted search and synonyms. These help to improve the discoverability of the website. You can seek professional help to enhance search functionality if you have the resources to do so.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Widely distributing your website content usually helps its SEO. You can thus use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to widely distribute your content over multiple servers worldwide. That helps your e-commerce website load quickly for users visiting from different locations around the world. Using CDNs to distribute content in your e-commerce website can significantly enhance the efficiency and speed of the website. That leads to a much faster page loading to enhance the experience of your customers.

Take Advantage of Extensions

You can have a collection of extensions programmed into your e-commerce store. These extensions can provide further options which help to increase the operation and efficiency of the website. However, it is advisable to be really choosy when opting for extensions because any poorly coded or incompatible extension can in fact hamper the performance of your website. Therefore, you must endeavor to install only extensions from clean stable sources making sure to follow up on them and keep updating them to ensure maximum optimization and safety.

Optimize Checkout Process

To enhance customer experience, offering a friendly and seamless checkout process is imperative. It can help to increase conversions and lower cart abandonment rates. Making checkout process as simple as possible helps this optimization. You can greatly optimize your checkout process by decreasing the steps involved; having multiple payment methods and making sure the steps open quickly. 

Utilize Caching Mechanisms

Caching is a major portion of the many stages of acceleration that your e-commerce store requires. You can greatly ease your server load and loading time for pages by enabling full-page caching. Online caching solutions are very handy to keep your webpages resolved to your customers in a much faster way.

Conduct Regular Performance Audits

If you want to enhance the performance of your website, it is imperative to conduct regular performance audits on the website. You can complete a performance audit on an ongoing basis on the website. Such audit will help you to spot and subsequently fix any issues that could be impacting the performance of your store. You can use online tools like the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to do performance checks on your site. With regular and frequent site audits, you can quickly identify efficiencies that can impact the performance of your website. You can then take remedial actions to make your e-commerce store perform much better.

Enhance Security Measures

Periodically, it is advisable to carry out security reviews on your website to prevent vulnerabilities in the site. It is highly important therefore for you to prioritize security in your e-commerce store. With hackers and cyber-criminals getting more sophisticated by the day, the importance of security on your e-commerce website need not be overemphasized. It is thus advisable to have comprehensive security solutions in place to safeguard your site and customer data from cyber-criminals. You can directly fortify your website by implementing some security certificates like SSL, 2-factor authentication, and having periodic security reviews. It is hugely important to keep your website up-to-date with security best practices and compliance needs at all times.

Conclusion

It is a smart business move to optimize the performance of your e-commerce store to enable it to serve your customers much better and stay ahead your competition. If you put the foregoing tips into practice, they’ll significantly help to enhance the performance of your e-commerce store.

5 Direct Benefits of Starting an E-Commerce Business

Technically, e-commerce is essentially a business arrangement of buying and selling of products/services online. E-commerce transactions take place in en e-commerce website which acts as a virtual storefront that allows customers to purchase what they want from their desktops, laptops or mobile devices. Even though physical stores may be operated through e-commerce websites, many e-commerce businesses practically operate solely online. It is through these websites that all B2C, B2B, C2C, C2B e-commerce business transactions take place. As e-commerce businesses become increasingly popular, there are a number of business benefits derivable from starting an e-commerce business, the most significant of which are: 

1. High Flexibility for Customers: In these days and age, many customers are notoriously very busy. The reason they often lack the time or desire to drive to do physical shopping in shopping malls to purchase their daily needs. This is where e-commerce stores become quite relevant. To save time, many customers usually turn to businesses that can serve them through an e-commerce website where they’ll be able to make purchases whenever they want, from the comfort of their own home, office or anywhere with an internet connection. This is practical shopping flexibility. Such flexibility can lead to happy and satisfied customers who like to make repeat purchases and even refer friends and family to the online store.

2. Ability to Reach a Broader Audience: E-commerce stores have no limitations of physical space. You can do business out of these stores 24/7 and in anywhere around the globe where there is internet services. This means with an e-commerce store, you don’t have to limit your customer base to where you’re present and physically located. Even if you’re in some remote corner of the world, provided there is an internet service, you can leverage the power of the internet to reach a very broad customer base across the world. This broader reach can help the e-commerce store to make more sales and consequently, more profits.

3. Low Overhead Costs: When compared to running a brick-and-mortar physical store, an e-commerce website is often more flexible and affordable. If you operate an e-commerce store, you save up on many overheads costs particularly rents for store space and utility bills. The only investment you really require to run an e-commerce store is to register a domain name, web hosting, inventory and digital marketing all at minimal costs.

4. Unlimited Access to Customer Data: Most e-commerce businesses typically allow you to collect valuable customer data real time. With onsite analytics data, you can gain valuable insights on your customers’ buying habits and demographics. Such data will in addition, allow you to have a better understanding of demand, valuable info you need to manage your inventory efficiently so as to be able to effectively reduce the risk of under-stocking or overstocking at any point in time.

5. Easy Scalability: As most business owners easily admit, it is much more difficult to grow a business with physical storefronts than one that operates online. If you operate an e-commerce store, your business growth is not limited by any physical factors making the business really very easy to scale. Your website and store can grow in tandem with the growth of your business with no limitations whatsoever in terms of more physical stores, shopping space and all that. Easy scalability is therefore a very significant benefit of running an e-commerce store.